The Bridesmaid's Secret

by Sophie Weston

  So what on earth is going on?

  She could not answer that. She tried, for hours it seemed. At six-thirty she gave up. The sky was still dark but the midnight blackness had gone.

  Traffic started to rumble. The undefeated birds who stuck it out through the New York winter started to twitter. Bella usually left crumbs and water for them on the fire escape. Every morning she went out and broke the ice in the bowl.

  Reminded now, she untangled herself from the covers. She pulled on track-suit bottoms, Aran sweater, gloves, and woolly hat and began to struggle with the dead-bolts.

  ‘Let me come up.’

  She had not let any man into this eyrie of hers. Privacy might be painful but it was precious. Until now she had not been tempted. Why had Gil Whoever-he-was been the first to offer that dark temptation?

  The trouble was, that bit was easy. He was gorgeous. All that dark intensity. The way he moved. The way he kissed.

  Forget the way he kissed, Bella advised herself dourly. He’s leaving New York and just as well. How many complications do you want in your life at one time?

  She got the door open. The small birds retreated to a neighbour’s guttering and sat there, lined up like a border patrol, watching her. She picked up the stick she kept for the purpose and smashed the ice. It was thinner than it had been last week. So there was no accounting for the violence with which she went at it. Bella shivered, put the stick down and clapped her gloved hands together.

  What was it about him?

  All right, he was a good dancer. So were half the men in New York. Anyway, she couldn’t let a man get under her guard just because he knew how to slide his hips round hers. It was crazy. Even in her former days of extreme party-going, she had never lost sleep over a guy she had danced with once.

  The birds watched her. She fetched the wild birdseed she had bought to augment her stale bread and scattered it. A lot missed the old plate she had designated as a bird feeder and fell through the ironwork. A few of the braver birds left their guttering and started picking among the seeds four floors below.

  The little flock pushed and jostled and flew at each other. They looked like children in a playground before school. Small struggles but basically companionable. Bella smiled, remembering how she’d set up a skipping game she had learned on the street when she’d gone to the first smart school that her stepfather, Tony, had sent her to. She had not done too badly at fitting into the new rich crowd. She was not doing too badly at fitting in here either, come to that. It was just—

  The cold of exile struck suddenly, as it always did. It was shocking as a knife slash. Bella bit her cold lip until it bled.

  But it was her own fault. She need not have been alone this morning.

  ‘Let me come up.’

  Her blood still hummed, like the crazy moment when she so nearly had done just that.

  Yet, if she had, she would still have been alone this morning, Bella thought. Even if he was still here, she would have been alone. She had been alone ever since Annis and Kosta fell in love. And she started to pretend.

  I’ll be pretending for the rest of my life, she thought desolately.

  Bella was shivering badly. She went back inside and flung the bolts into place.

  But she did not want to go back to the rumpled, lonely bed. Instead she made herself some coffee and sat at the breakfast bar. She had flung her notebooks down there yesterday. Now she pulled them towards her, starting to rough out another of her New in Town columns. Rita Caruso had not commissioned it but what the heck? If she had a piece ready and they had a slot to fill, it might come in handy. At least it took her mind off the irresolvable dilemma of what on earth was going on last night.

  Gil had a breakfast meeting with the patent lawyers. He had never found it so difficult to concentrate.

  He should have tried harder. On the other hand, maybe he should not have come on so strong. At least he should have taken her business card when she’d offered it to him. How could he have let her walk away from him like that?

  When the senior lawyer started to explain the evolution of intellectual property law, he nearly lost it. A figure like a flame danced just out of vision. He knew it was only in his imagination but his body responded as if she were in the room.

  Get a grip, he thought, between shock and amusement. There are a lot of people depending on you here. Tina the Tango Dancer is strictly an after-hours activity.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the lawyer. ‘I don’t think I quite understood that. Could you run it by me again?’

  She didn’t invade the corporate lawyers’ meeting because he kept asking questions. Gil always found it was a useful discipline. But he had never needed it so badly before.

  He took Annis with him to meet the bankers. He was going to use some of her work, after all.

  In the cab she said, ‘Are you all right?’

  It startled him. ‘Sure. Why?’

  ‘You look different,’ she said doubtfully.

  He was not surprised. He felt different. He had never felt so alive.

  Tina the Tango Dancer, I’m going to find you again, he promised silently.

  Aloud he said, ‘This is all new for me.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Annis. She gave him an encouraging smile but she was looking wan this morning too. He said so.

  ‘Things didn’t go as well with my sister as I hoped,’ she admitted. ‘We’re going to talk it over again this evening. But, frankly, I’m not hopeful. Bella is the loveliest person. But when she makes her mind up—’ She sighed. ‘Oh, well, no point in thinking about that yet. Tell me how you want to play this meeting.’

  Gil excised the mocking blonde ghost. This meeting was a matter of survival. He would concentrate on his private life once he had secured the future for the people who were dependent on him. For the moment, he had another priority.

  An hour later he looked round the faces at the shiny board-room table and drew a long breath.

  Well, I’ve given it my best shot. If they don’t buy that, goodbye independence.

  He did not let it show of course. After the crash course Annis had given him in the ways of high-management skills and even higher finance, he sometimes thought his face had frozen. It was still the same face when he looked in the mirror: high cheekbones; aquiline nose; gold-flecked brown eyes that his female students used to say were melting. And then that problem mouth. Not just his students, every woman he met took one look at his mouth and decided he was an unbridled voluptuary. It had taken professional advice to tell him that. It had taken a lot more than advice to curb its effect.

  Even after months of practice, Gil knew he could not afford to relax his guard for a moment. He needed these bankers to think of him as a keen businessman, not a dreamer. And certainly not a sex object. So he schooled his features into arctic aloofness and tried to forget that he had ever had any spontaneous feelings at all.

  Or that every single spontaneous feeling had been aroused only a few short hours ago. Tina, you have a lot to answer for, he told the mocking phantom, with a silent groan.

  ‘You’re very sure about this,’ said one woman. ‘Why?’

  He could answer that without thinking. ‘Because I needed it. I designed this system because I wanted to do all those things. There just wasn’t a package I could buy that gave it to me.’

  ‘Not a single package maybe.’ That was the industry specialist. Gil had been at MIT with him. ‘But surely if you went looking, bought a number and spliced them…’

  ‘No,’ said Gil. ‘I tried that.’ He looked round the table. ‘Believe me, I never set out to design a system. I was a user of this stuff. And there’s nothing out there that will give me what this new system of mine will give. Watifdotcom lets anyone buy some time on the system to do their own research.’

  They all looked intrigued. Gil forgot that they were New York bankers. They were people who wanted to understand something that puzzled them. Just like his students. Just like his small staff. And he wa
s good at explaining.

  His laptop computer was still connected to the screen at the end of the room. He cleared the page of projected sales.

  ‘Look,’ he said, typing furiously. Icons began to burst onto the screen. ‘Here you have the information sources. Almost infinite. And here you have the possible functions. Too many to count easily.’

  He leaped up and went to stand beside the screen at the end of the room. He felt comfortable at once. This was what he knew. He could run a class with nothing but a blackboard and his enthusiasm and he always had. Underneath, these guys wanted what he had: a vision.

  They were all looking at him expectantly. Gil grinned, suddenly sure he was going to bring this off.

  ‘You want to do something original? OK, you need to control your material, you’ve got to have choice.’ He stabbed one of the icons on the screen before looking back at them. ‘But you also need an element of surprise. The random attraction that pulls you off any path you could have forecast.’ He flung his arms out. ‘And, hey, welcome to a new universe. This is the way it works…’

  Afterwards he was not so sure it had been a good idea to turn the meeting into a seminar. He got his face back under control but something told him that the whole atmosphere had changed.

  Not that he could tell it from the way they looked at him. They all wore impassive expressions to rival his own, at least when he was remembering. Six months ago, Gil would have despaired. For a moment he nearly did.

  But his friendly consultant, currently sitting composedly beside him with her neat hands in her lap, had insisted he read up on body language. He had and, like everything Gil did, he had had done it thoroughly. In meetings these days even his handshake was carefully calculated.

  So he knew what to look for. Finger-tapping, shoulders turned away from him, disengaged eye contact—they would all be bad signs. There were none of them! Everyone round the table was still looking at him.

  Inspired, he added, with that upper-class English diffidence they all liked so much, ‘It’s a neat little system. We’re all rather keen on it.’

  The hard woman at the head of the table laughed. It was a friendly laugh.

  For the first time in the last horrible days, Gil began to let himself hope. Really hope.

  Tina, you brought me luck, he told his unseen companion.

  Back in control, he did not let it show.

  ‘I agree. It would be a real shame to sell that to a bunch of asset-strippers. You want it to stay in the hands of people who will push it to its full potential,’ said the industry specialist.

  ‘You’re a believer, Mick,’ said the hard woman. But she said it tolerantly. ‘OK, Professor de la Court. You’ve convinced me I’m looking at the twenty-second century here. Now convince me there are enough future technofreaks out there to buy into it today.’

  Gil did.

  The sales statistics did not excite him like the WATIF system did but he knew them backwards. It took a surprisingly short time. The bankers asked fewer questions than he had expected. He and Annis had foreseen all of them. He answered without hesitating.

  ‘OK. That wraps it up for me,’ said the chair briskly. ‘Anybody else?’

  The team shook their heads.

  ‘Then, thank you, Professor de la Court, Ms Carew. We’ll get back to you.’

  Outside the bank Gil said, ‘I’ve got something I need to see to. See you back at the hotel?’

  ‘I’m seeing my sister before the flight,’ Annis said warningly.

  ‘Oh. Well, I’ll see you on the plane anyway. Best to make our own way to the airport?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He raised an arm to call a cab.

  Something in his face made Annis say, ‘What are you up to, Gil?’

  He looked down at her, amused. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I’d have thought that fighting for your commercial life was pretty exciting. But you haven’t lit up like this until now.’

  His eyes danced. ‘Ah, but this one is a real challenge.’

  Annis cast her eyes to heaven. ‘Don’t tell me. You met some computer genius at that club of yours last night. You’re recruiting again.’

  He laughed out loud at that. ‘Wait and see,’ he said aggravatingly.

  And jumped into a yellow taxi that skidded to a halt in front of them.

  Annis stamped her feet on the ice-dusted pavement, puffed out her cheeks and turned her steps to the hotel.

  Gil did not have much luck at the blonde’s apartment house. A woman with half-moon glasses and a suspicious nature refused to tell him so much as the girl’s name. There were six names to choose from and nothing to show the sex or marital status of any of them. None of the initials was T.

  So she was not called Tina. Well, he had not really thought she was. He retired to the diner where they had had coffee but no one there seemed to know her either. Or if they did, they weren’t admitting it.

  In fact they were not really interested in him at all. One of the waitresses had a long-stemmed rose tucked in her waist-band and both of them were exclaiming over a Cellophane-wrapped bouquet that a trucker had brought.

  ‘Somebody’s birthday?’ said Gil, trying to ease his way into their good graces with friendly chat.

  The girls looked at him with scorn. ‘It’s Valentine’s Day.’ They did not actually add ‘dummy’ but it was there in their tone.

  ‘Valentine’s Day,’ said Gil on a long note of revelation. ‘Valentine’s Day. Just what I need.’

  Bella got to work early after her disturbed night. No one in the office noticed. They were all too busy with the next issue. And then, when they had finally concluded their editorial meeting, the big glass-walled room was full of cries of well-simulated surprise as baskets of flowers arrived hourly.

  ‘Oh, look at those,’ said Sally, as a tall basket-weave horn of crimson roses was winched onto the circular table at which Bella was working today. ‘Someone loves you.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Bella cheerfully. ‘These are for Rita.’

  ‘Don’t believe it. None of her men survives long enough to send flowers,’ said Sally positively.

  Bella laughed. ‘Then, the undead are doing great. She’s got four major arrangements in there already and the day is young.’

  Sally shook her head disapprovingly. ‘Then, freeze onto the roses. You don’t want to be the only woman in the place without a Valentine bouquet.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was competitive.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve never worked in an office before. Of course it’s competitive.’

  Sally’s own desk bore a very pretty posy of primroses and violets. It had come with a card she was not showing anyone. But every time she took it out and read it—which was at five minute intervals—she blushed.

  It was that, rather than Rita Caruso’s lustrously blooming office, which made Bella feel restless.

  ‘I don’t think we take it so seriously in England.’

  Sally popped her eyes. ‘No roses? No romantic gestures?’

  ‘I’ve had cards but they are usually jokes,’ Bella admitted.

  Sally muttered darkly about the stupidity, crassness and general lack of imagination on the part of Englishmen.

  But Bella did not want to think about Englishmen. They had a habit of whispering ‘Let me come up’ in her ear when she ought to have been concentrating on work or screwing her courage to the sticking point to go to the wedding.

  She said hastily, ‘Maybe it’s me. After all, none of the New York guys are sending me flowers either.’

  ‘Only because you never let them get beyond the first date. Even so, I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy from finance—’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not? If even Caruso gets roses, when people know she eats a new man every time there’s a full moon, you’ve got to be in with a chance.’

  ‘Rita has column power. I’m not doing a feature on anyone.’

  ‘So young. So cynical
,’ mourned Sally. She grinned suddenly. ‘You’re learning, English.’

  Bella laughed. But, even so, being the only woman to leave the office without flowers was surprisingly uncomfortable. Swaying on the overcrowded subway to meet Annis, she assured herself that she was glad not to have to be struggling with a bouquet. But the habitual winter public transport smell of wet raincoat and cough syrup was shot through with the scent of hothouse flowers.

  Annis was waiting for her in the lobby of the hotel with her overnight bag.

  ‘Coming to stay?’ said Bella, surprised.

  ‘I’ll go straight on to the airport from wherever we eat. That gives us a good long evening. I’ve only got carry-on luggage, so I don’t have to check in till the last moment.’

  ‘Great,’ said Bella hollowly.

  But it was not Annis who brought up the subject of the wedding.

  ‘I thought you guys were determined to keep it small,’ said Bella, as they were talking about Lynda. ‘How can you have let Mother get so out of hand?’

  Annis was philosophical. ‘You’ve got to be realistic. Tony is rich and noisy. And Kosta…’ her eyes lit with remembered warmth ‘…has his following on the social circuit.’

  Bella smiled. It was an effort but it had to be done. She could not pretend Kosta did not exist. Annis might suspect something.

  So she said truthfully, ‘Of course he has. He’s very tasty. Half of London will go into mourning when he takes himself out of circulation.’

  Annis regarded her with something bordering on exasperation. ‘You are so right. Think about it.’

  Since Bella had been working hard at blanking out the wedding altogether, this was not advice she welcomed. It was one thing to know that Annis and Kosta were happy, half the world away. It was quite another to go and watch them snuff out all her dreams.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Half of London will be thumbing through the photographs seeing who isn’t there. You know as well as I do that the papers are going to pick it up, no matter how quiet and countrified we try to keep it. What are they going to say about the absentee sister?’

  Bella had not thought of that. Annis was right. There had to be at least a chance that some unfriendly gossip columnist would suggest that the bride’s sister was too jealous to come. And from there it was a short step to speculating why. It was an unwelcome thought. She had kept her secret so far. She did not want a journalist with a few hours to spare digging it up and printing it.