Folly's Child

by Janet Tanner

  Beneath the duvet Nick stirred, flinging his arms across the empty space where Harriet should have been. She stood stock still, hoping he would drift off to sleep once more without realising she was not there. But after a moment he turned over again, mumbling thickly: ‘Harri? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here,’ she hissed. ‘ Go back to sleep.’

  ‘What are you doing out of bed? You’ll catch your death.’

  ‘No I won’t.’ His concern irritated her. Wasn’t that what she had wanted, though? Someone to be here, to care about her? So why now did the very fact that he was awake and talking to her seem like an invasion of her privacy?

  ‘Come back to bed, love.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘No, you’re bloody not!’ He got out of bed, exclaiming as the cold air enveloped his warm sleepy frame. ‘Christ, this place is like an icebox! Hasn’t your heater come on?’

  ‘I don’t have one in the bedroom, Nick. It’s healthier not to.’

  ‘Healthier! To catch bloody pneumonia!’ He caught her, steering her back to the bed, bundling her in, dressing gown and all. She allowed him to do it though her irritation mounted. She couldn’t ask him to stay then yell at him for caring for her. She lay stiffly as he huddled close, sharing the warmth.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she said into his shoulder.

  ‘Not now,’ he protested. ‘ There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow.’

  ‘No, there won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve made up my mind, Nick. I have to try and learn the truth. If Mom is still alive I have to find her. If she’s not, well …’

  He did not answer.

  ‘I’m going home,’ she said. ‘ On the first available flight. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. I suppose you’ll do what you have to do.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Only one thing – be sure you take your camera with you.’

  She laughed softly. ‘Oh Nick, always first and foremost the editor!’

  ‘Always that.’ There was regret in his sleepy voice.

  She was growing warmer now and drowsier. With the decision made she felt a kind of temporary peace.

  ‘All right, Nick,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll take my camera with me.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  She had no way of knowing that he was thinking not so much of the next photo story she would submit to him as the necessary therapy it might provide. A journey into the past, with skeletons rattling in cupboards at every dark turning, was almost bound to be upsetting. Nick, with his unfailing journalist’s instinct, felt in his bones that this one would be more traumatic than most.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In his office high up in the twenty-five storey building that is 550 Fashion Avenue, mecca of the New York fashion industry, Hugo Varna sat at his desk and fiddled with the executive toy Sally had bought for him last Christinas. It was a stupid thing, he thought, three gold baubles on springs that set up a continual motion, banging one against the other, and he kept it on his desk only to please her. But today with his mind too preoccupied to work he seemed quite unable to keep his hands off it. It clicked irritatingly and Hugo pushed it aside, swivelling his chair around to face the window and the panoramic view of Manhattan.

  Hugo Varna’s showrooms occupied an entire floor of the 550 building and from the moment a potential client stepped out of the brass elevator she was treated to an ambience of unashamed luxury. The vast foyer was carpeted in the softest green imaginable, the walls were even paler, so that at first glance they might have been taken for white, and the Venetian blinds were a perfectly blended shade of moss. The minimum of furniture emphasised the impressive size of the foyer – only small modern tables bearing huge smoked glass ash trays, two or three low chairs and a huge arrangement of dried ferns and foliage in shades of brown and gold graced the enormous expanse. From cunningly concealed speakers piped music wafted, but music played so softly that it was almost inaudible to the human ear, a faint teasing melody that soothed the soul and created a restful atmosphere almost without one being aware of it.

  This soft green womb formed an oasis of peace in the chaotic tumble that was Fashion Avenue. Outside in the street the traffic might roar, here there was hush broken only by that soft subliminal music, outside the air might be heavy with the mingled smells of petrol fumes and donuts, Macdonalds’ burgers, trash cans, and sweat, here there was just the faintest perfume of a pine pot-pourri, subtle as the music.

  Even the bustling atmosphere of the 550 building itself seemed not to have invaded the Hugo Varna floor. Here the sales staff glided about with languid grace more reminiscent of Paris than New York, the house models managed to look like elegant advertisements for Varna even after a long session of standing stock still while a toile was pinned and draped and adjusted around them, and even when a rail of sample clothes had to be wheeled across the hallowed expanse of green, carefully hidden inside grey and black sample bags to make sure they were safe from the photographic eye of a fashion spy, it was managed with what Hugo referred to as ‘panache’

  ‘The simplest of jobs can be done with panache’, he would instruct whenever one of his staff fell short of his standards of perfection – the standards that endeared him to his ‘Shiny Set’ customers and staff alike.

  Hugo himself was lithe, elegant and charming with a slight edge of fascinating middle-European foreignness that came from his Bulgarian father. But it was his own formidable talent that set him apart.

  Mostly nowadays Hugo took for granted all the assets that talent had brought him. Twenty years at the pinnacle of his profession had paid him handsomely and he accepted the accolades and the financial rewards as no more than his due. But on occasions he stopped in his tracks to wonder just what he was doing here, amidst all this elegance and opulence, numbering the rich and famous and powerful amongst his clients – and his friends.

  Not bad for the son of a penniless illegal immigrant, he thought then, not bad for a boy raised on the wrong side of town.

  ‘Where exactly do you hail from, Hugo?’ Margie Llewellyn, the chat-show queen, had asked him once when she had interviewed him, and he had mesmerised her millions of viewers with the story he had told. His father, a seaman, had jumped ship to seek a better life when Bulgaria had been on the brink of civil war in the 1920s. He had taken the name of Varna from the name of the port from which he had sailed but he had lived his life in terror of deportation, a fear that had haunted him long after it had ceased to be a real threat, so that he had never been able to enjoy his son’s success, seeing it only as something which drew unwelcome attention to the Varna family.

  Hugo had been perfectly happy to talk at length on the Margie Llewellyn Show about the days when he had played on the streets of the Bronx, and how in this unlikely setting a talent for sketching had developed into an interest in designing clothes. Apart from his father, Hugo’s family had consisted entirely of women – his mother, his three sisters, his maternal grandmother and various assorted aunts and cousins all of whom (his mother excepted) had striven to dress with what Hugo would later call ‘panache’ on a pittance. He had taken far more interest in their efforts than his father had thought was right and proper for a boy and when Leonie, his eldest sister, had been apprenticed to a dressmaker his fascination had grown. From sketching the outfits she made to inventing designs of his own was but a short step and by the time he left High School he knew exactly what he wanted to do. His sisters, all working by this time, supported him through a course at the New York Fashion Institute of Technology. They were inordinately proud of him, if slightly puzzled by their unusually talented brother.

  When he graduated Hugo took a succession of low-paid jobs in 7th Avenue and the optimism with which he had set out began to be dimmed by the sheer sick-making banality of what he had to do – cutting samples in the disgusting fabrics with which the greedy cutthroat manufacturers he worked for made their living. But all the while he was learning
and soon the time had come when he was no longer satisfied to design for others. He began cutting his own samples on his mother’s kitchen table and getting them made up by his sister and her friends at the dressmaker’s where she worked.

  The situation could not last, of course. One day Leonie’s employer had got wind of what was going on, sacked Leonie and placed a telephone call to Victor Nicholson, the ignorant, ill-tempered manufacturer Hugo was contracted to at the time. A distraught Leonie tried unsuccessfully to contact Hugo to warn him and the first he knew of the débâcle was when he was summoned to Nicholson’s cramped stale-tobacco smelling office. The moment he walked in at the door he knew something was very wrong. Nicholson, who could often be found reading cartoon comics at this time of day, was pacing the untidy office like a caged lion, his face and his thick neck suffused ugly puce above the none-too-white collar of his shirt.

  As Hugo entered the office he whirled round, blundering into his flimsy chair and almost overturning it.

  ‘What the hell is going on, eh, you little runt? You trying to ruin me, is that it?’

  Totally taken by surprise Hugo could only stare. Nicholson reached across the desk, grabbing Hugo by the lapels and pulling him towards him.

  ‘Don’t stand there looking like Shirley Bloody Temple. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been cheating me, you stinking ass hole, letting me pay you for second-rate designs while you market the best ideas yourself.’

  Hugo understood then. He began to shake, not because he was physically afraid of Nicholson, though the man was twice his size, but because he could suddenly see his world falling apart around him. He’d taken a chance and he’d been found out.

  ‘I suppose this means you want me to leave,’ he said with what dignity he could, half-sprawled across the desk with his chin six inches above the remains of a take-away pizza and a cardboard cup of coffee dregs.

  ‘Too right it does. And that’s not all.’ Nicholson released him, pushing him back so hard he almost fell. ‘Now hear this and hear it good. I’m suing you, Varna, for every cent you’ve made from your dirty little deals – and for the designs. They belong to me – you’re under contract, don’t forget.’

  Hugo snorted derisively. Although the very thought of court action had brought him out in a cold sweat, the same grittiness which had enabled his father to jump ship and seek a new life now came to his rescue.

  ‘Waste your money on lawyers if that’s the way you want it,’ he retorted. ‘You’ll make a fool of yourself though. Those designs are mine, done in my own time and made up by my own outworkers. You’d never use them anyway. They have too much class for the women who buy the rubbish you produce.’

  Nicholson had turned such a deep shade of purple Hugo thought he was about to suffer a stroke.

  ‘Get out of here!’ he yelled. ‘I don’t want to see your ass around here again – understand? Get out!’

  Hugo had got out. He had left the squalid little office that afternoon never to return. It was the most important thing he had ever done in his life, he had told Margie Llewellyn, and across a nation the rich and famous, the elegant and the glittering society women who were his clients wholeheartedly echoed the sentiment.

  Nicholson had never carried out his threat to sue, though Hugo had endured some worrying weeks waiting to see if papers would be served on him, and the experience had made him determined never to work for the likes of Nicholson again.

  His early ventures into freelance design had been reasonably successful; with Leonie’s encouragement he worked long hours as a restaurant porter to earn enough money to buy a couple of ancient industrial machines which he set up at one end of the living room of his mother’s house. Soon the place was alive with their busy whirr as Leonie and one of her friends stitched samples; to their accompaniment Hugo worked on new designs.

  The story of this far from illustrious beginning was one Hugo never tired of telling, for the fact that he had started with nothing but raw talent and stubborn determination was something of which he was justifiably proud but he was less forthcoming about what had happened next. When Margie had mentioned his association with Greg Martin, the financier who had made him the loan which had set him up in a small showroom and enabled him to move the sewing machines out of the living room and into a work room, Hugo became not so much evasive as totally silent.

  Without a doubt it had been Greg’s backing which had propelled him into the big league; without him, for all his talent, Hugo might have been trapped in small-time design and manufacture for ever. But the very mention of Greg Martin’s name was painful to Hugo. He had skilfully evaded Margie’s questions, moving on to talk instead about Kurt Eklund, the financial genius he had hired after Greg’s death to help him avoid what had seemed at the time almost certain ruin. It had been Kurt who had set up the dozens of licensing deals for menswear and toiletries, bedlinen and beachwear, soft furnishings and costume jewellery, all bearing the name of Hugo Varna, which had not only saved him from bankruptcy but also made him his first million. In the process Kurt had graduated from business adviser to trusted friend; Hugo had rewarded him with a fifteen per cent share of the business and never regretted it.

  Margie had not pressed Hugo to talk about Greg Martin though her professional instincts had nagged at her that if she could probe a little into the association it would produce some riveting television. But she also sensed how deep Hugo’s hurt ran and since his first wife’s death was also connected with the man she told herself it would be tasteless to dwell on it.

  The truth was, of course, that hard-nosed journalist though she was, Margie was as attracted to Hugo as was almost every other woman who met him and she actually wanted him to like her.

  The momentary weakness had bothered her for weeks afterwards as she worried as to whether she had lost her professionalism along with the opportunity to grill Hugo Varna over the truth about his relationship – and Paula’s – with the man who had died as he lived in a blaze of publicity. But whether she had been right or wrong, Hugo had been allowed off the hook. He did not talk about Greg Martin. He did not even think about Greg Martin if he could help it. As he left the studio after the interview his well-programmed defence mechanism had come into operation, and he had pushed the painful memories into a corner of his brain where his conscious mind could not reach them.

  Now, however, to his intense discomfort, Hugo found there was no way he could prevent himself from thinking about Greg Martin. From the moment the news had broken that he was not dead at all but very much alive in Australia he had been unable to think of anything else. None of the usual tricks for shutting off memory would work now; whatever he did, whichever way he diverted his attention it would only come wandering back, like a man in a maze who continually finds himself back in the same spot. It was insufferable – awful. He was beginning to think he was going mad. His nerves jangled in time with the balls on the executive toy on his desk and his brain felt as thick and muzzy as the grey January sky above the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

  A slight commotion in the outer office attracted his attention.

  His secretary’s voice, raised in agitation: ‘I’m sorry – Mr Varna is not to be disturbed. You can’t go in there!’

  And another voice, one he instantly recognised: ‘Like hell I can’t!’

  The door flew open and Harriet burst in. Behind her the secretary floundered helplessly.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Varna, I couldn’t stop her.’

  ‘It’s all right, Nancy. This is my daughter.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Varna, I’m so sorry …’ she stuttered, even more horrified by her gaffe than she had been about letting a strange woman push her way into the holy of holies. Nancy Ball had only been with Hugo for a few months and it was much longer than that since Harriet had visited him at the office. It had simply never occurred to her that the young woman in a ski jacket with faded jeans tucked into her boots might actually be Hugo Varna’s daughter!

  ‘Don’t worry about it, N
ancy,’ he said comfortingly. ‘You weren’t to know.’

  She retreated, casting one last flustered glance at Harriet. Sally, Hugo’s wife, was always so beautifully turned out, while this girl was … well, frankly almost scruffy! Women simply never turned up at the showrooms of one of America’s top designers dressed like that, and with practically no make-up. Hugo’s daughter! Well! well!

  ‘Dad – I had to come,’ Harriet said as the door closed after the secretary. ‘You’ve heard the news, of course.’

  ‘Yes.’ Even without the simple affirmation his face would have given her the answer; he looked pale and drawn, as if he had slept even less than she had. ‘I tried to call you but there was no reply from your flat.’

  ‘I was in Paris on a job. I saw a newspaper there. I rushed back to London, packed a few fresh things and came straight here.’

  ‘Harriet … I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Why should you be sorry?’

  ‘It must have been a terrible shock for you …’

  ‘And for you!’ she said hotly. ‘After all this time – it’s almost unbelievable. Do you suppose there’s any truth in it?’

  He spread his hands helplessly. ‘I wish I knew. But I can’t see why anyone should invent a story like that.’

  ‘Maybe she’s some kind of nut.’

  ‘Maybe. But as you said, Harri, it’s such a long time ago. Most people have forgotten all about Greg Martin. I can’t imagine what would prompt this woman to dredge it all up if there wasn’t some truth in it. I can think of a dozen men of much more recent notoriety if she was simply inventing it for some cranky reason of her own. Besides …’ He broke off, staring for a moment at the glinting gold balls, then raising his eyes to meet Harriet’s directly, ‘if you look at the past, it’s quite feasible that she knew Greg. There was a connection.’