'Very.'
'She phoned me twice—once to find out where you were and once to tell me she'd seen you.' Now she was sounding amused, asking, 'What did she say? "Hello and are you at a loose end tonight?" or "How about a drink to celebrate your escape? You must be a fantastic driver."' She drawled the 'fantastic' in a way that Jo-Ann had, and he laughed.
'You're not too far off, but it started with an offer to help me find a house. She tells me she was in real estate for a while.'
'She was in an estate office,' Charlotte recalled. 'For a few weeks a few years ago.' Jo-Ann had gone from job to job when she first left school, her looks and confidence impressing the interviewers and opening the doors. But as jobs became scarce that stopped, and now she was a student again, taking an art course and always on the watch for a man. Jo-Ann intended to marry well, and although Charlotte did not imagine for a moment that Saul Laurenson would get that involved she wished she could warn him. She said slowly, 'She's very attractive, but she's not one of my best friends.'
'That's funny.' Saul had seated himself and was scratching the top of Georgy's head. Georgy was very still. 'Because she said you were her very dearest friend.' Something unpleasant was coming, Charlotte knew, before he added gravely, 'Mind you, she did say you'd never done a day's work in your life and men made such fools of themselves over you.'
Charlotte began to splutter furiously, then she began to laugh because, coming from Jo-Ann, that was funny. Charlotte worked a darn sight harder than she did and some men had behaved ridiculously over Charlotte, but she had never exploited them, while Jo-Ann would have taken their last penny before she waved goodbye.
'The nerve of the girl!' Charlotte grinned. 'And all I was going to do was warn you that she's a cow.' Then it struck her that he might imagine she was trying to put him off Jo-Ann because she was interested in him herself, playing an identical game to Jo-Ann, in short, and she said hastily, 'There are some super girls round here that I could introduce you to.'
'No, thanks.' He was sitting by the bowl of roses and he leaned across to read the card. 'For a clever girl.' His dark brows rose. 'Is that you?'
'Yes.'
'You did nothing clever. All you did was nearly get yourself killed.'
She knew that. Anyhow, those words didn't matter. 'Love, J,' was what mattered, red roses for love. If Jeremy had been here now he would be sitting beside her, comforting her. She wondered if Saul had put his arms around Jo-Ann last night, and felt suddenly empty and lonely. She said stiffly, 'I have to thank you—if you hadn't held me back I would have been badly cut, perhaps worse. Actually I am into the habit of wearing a seat-belt, but when you ordered me to put it on that put my back up. I hate being bossed about.'
He said quietly, 'That's another habit you might have to get into,' and she wondered if she had heard aright. If she had she knew who the boss would be, and it was hard to look unflinchingly at him and ask, 'Would you care to explain that?'
'Your father should be here any minute.' He smiled with unsmiling eyes. 'Perhaps it's time we had a get-together of the interested parties.' .
Charlotte was supposed to be upstairs still, in bed. When her father arrived he wouldn't expect to find her here, but nothing could have dragged her away now. 'High time,' she said, 'if you have plans that include giving me your orders. But until my father gets here would you mind waiting in another room? I still have a headache.' Saul said, 'Of course,' and that perhaps she should carry on resting, but she retorted, 'Some hope, after what you've just said!' She wanted him to go quickly before she started to panic and bombard him with questions, but as he reached the door she asked, 'Is anything I might have to say likely to make any difference?'
'No,' he said, and she knew that everything was signed and sealed. He stood in the doorway, head turned, looking at her for what seemed a very long time, and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth so that she couldn't speak until he had closed the door after him, then the words came out in a whisper: 'What do you want from me?' Dunscombes was the family firm and of course what happened to it mattered to her, and would matter to everybody working there. But just now, when Saul Laurenson looked at her, it had seemed more personal than that. Something between the two of them, something he wanted from her. She felt as trapped as though he had caught her wrist in his strong fingers and pulled her towards him, and she picked up Georgy and hugged him, burying her face in the warm talcum-scented fur. 'Why did you sit there and let him stroke you?' she demanded. 'Paralysed with fright, probably, and well you might be!'
Her robe was only secured by the belt. If it fell open her only covering would be a thin nightdress, and she wondered whether she should go up to her room and dress. But if her father was due any minute she would like to get that 'get-together of the interested parties' over first. She might be needing to take a walk after that, if it was only down to the bottom of the garden to sit in the cool air of the patio. She would ring Jeremy and ask him to meet her. She might be needing Jeremy.
She took one of the shorter-stemmed roses from the bowl, then opened drawers in a black ebony Chinese bureau until she found a safety pin, and pinned the rose at her throat fastening the robe. That covered her securely. She was anxious to be covered.
She tried to get Jeremy, but there was no answer, either from his flat or the theatre. She was still listening to the ringing, in what must be an empty theatre, when she heard her father's car and put down the receiver. She wished somebody had answered, it would have made her feel less alone. She was safe at home, with Aunt Lucy within earshot and her father coming into the house, but as she stood there she felt a terrifying isolation.
Her father and Saul Laurenson came into the room together. Her father was shaking his head at her, going on about her getting up before she should have done, exclaiming at the blue-black colour of her bruised forehead. But she couldn't take her eyes off Saul Laurenson.
'Sit down,' ordered her father. 'You know you should still be resting.'
She sat and so did he, but Saul walked towards the fireplace and stood there, facing them as though he was host here, and Charlotte said, 'I'm all right. All I want to know is—what's going on?'
'You mean about the business?' Her father spoke very slowly and deliberately, but her words came in a rush because the time for hedging was over.
'Yes, that is what I mean. If we do still have a business. I suppose Dunscombes hasn't become Laurensons?'
'Not quite,' said her father ruefully, 'but perhaps it should, because it's a long time since Dunscombes made a healthy profit.'
He had never told her that until yesterday, and she said now, 'Well, who does make a healthy profit these days?'
'I do,' said Saul.
'And what do you do for it?' She resented his success when her father had the look of a beaten man. 'Who are you anyway?' she demanded harshly, and her father made a protesting gesture, hushing her, telling her, 'Among other things Saul owns shops and department stores, here and abroad. He has the selling outlets, the export markets.'
'Well, well,' she drawled, 'a real-life tycoon! And what are your plans for us?' She knew that times were changing, but individually crafted items couldn't be turned out in vast quantities by their small staff, so what was the use of talking about department stores and exports?
Her father was talking about reorganisation now and she asked, 'Must we?'
'The alternative is to close down,' he said simply, and she went cold.
'That bad?'
He nodded, and Charlotte couldn't believe that she hadn't known. But there had been no redundancies, nothing to show they were no longer a flourishing firm. 'So what's going to happen?' she asked, and she looked at Saul and thought, It was right, what I feared, he's the takeover man.
Her father said, 'No one will lose their job, that's part of the agreement.'
'How about you?' Dunscombes had been his life. He had managed the business as well as owning it.
'I shall carry on,' he said, 'but without the re
sponsibility, and I can do without that.'
Taking orders, in short. Working for Saul Laurenson. She asked, 'And what about me?'
Saul spoke for the first time in a long time. All the while he had been watching them, and when she spoke she clutched her robe tighter around her, almost crushing the rose before she realised what she was doing. 'I was impressed by some of your designs,' he told her. 'I'm sure we can keep you occupied.'
'That is kind of you. Shall I need the work?' She made herself smile, and her father said, 'You've always enjoyed it, haven't you? Always had a flair.'
'Yes,' she agreed, 'I enjoy it.' He hadn't said she need not work for the new management, and she wanted to ask, 'What kind of deal is this? How much is he paying and what's left?' but she felt as though the ground was shifting beneath her feet.
Her father looked grey, his face and his hair. She wanted to kneel beside him and put her arms around him and tell him it was going to be all right, but she could do none of that in front of Saul Laurenson.
She said, 'Well, it's a shock. A bombshell. I just didn't have a clue that all this was going on and I think I've heard as much as I can take in for a while. I'll go up to my room now, I think, and I'll see you later.' She smiled again, stretching her lips, and stooped to pick up Georgy, holding him so tightly that he wriggled.
Upstairs she waited for her father to come. She had dressed, putting on the first thing that she took out of the wardrobe. It was a lightweight linen dress, but if it had been thick wool she would still have got into it, because her mind wasn't on what she was doing.
Georgy sensed trouble and watched her with the whites of his eyes showing and his ears twitching. When her father came into the room she ran across to him, and he put his arms around her and said, 'It's going to be all right.'
That was what she had been going to tell him, she felt he was more in need of comfort than she was, and she said now, 'Yes, of course, I know that, but tell me—does he own the business? Do we have any say in anything any more?'
'Sit down.' She sat on the edge of the bed and her father crossed to the window, talking with his back to her as though he couldn't face her. 'You know, don't you, that you matter more to me than anything else in the world?'
'Yes, of course. So do you to me, and if you've had to sell out I understand that. I only wish you'd told me sooner so that I could have helped. Done something, maybe.'
'There's something you can do,' he told her, and she had almost reached him, to kiss him and promise him anything, when he said the words that stopped her dead. 'You can marry Saul.'
CHAPTER FIVE
'What?' exclaimed Charlotte. 'What?' Her father didn't repeat his words, he knew she had heard him. He didn't turn either and she stood looking at his back as he stared unseeingly out of the window. The stooped shoulders didn't look like her father, who had always been straight and upright and strong. Then he said, 'We're in a bad way. If Saul hadn't taken over the business I don't know what we should have done.'
'I've never heard of him.' He owned Dunscombes and until three days ago she had never heard his name.
'He left England fifteen years ago. He used to have a stall on Wickham market.' That was one of the smaller local markets, and Charlotte said, 'Small beginnings. Or did he have shops there too?'
'Just the one stall—selling saddlery, that sort of thing. He was seventeen. Two years later he had stalls in half a dozen markets. Then he went to Australia.'
'And he's come back a millionaire?'
'At least.'
'He did well.'
'Yes.' Colin Dunscombe straightened and his voice strengthened, and she knew that he was pulling himself together before he turned to face her. 'He hasn't changed much. I knew him at once when I saw him again.'
'Did he always look like Dracula?' Charlotte asked idiotically, and her father stared at her, puzzled, then smiled.
'He always had a lean and hungry look. He always stood out as someone who would outpace the rest. I met him in Antwerp in February.' Antwerp was the diamond centre where her father, as a manufacturing jeweller, went to buy uncut stones. 'We nearly passed each other just outside the Rubens house. He asked me to have dinner with him that night and we talked. He was there because he owned the hotel we were eating in, and I was there because it was the time of year I always went to Antwerp. I wasn't buying anything. I was wondering where I could start looking for a buyer for Dunscombes.'
'You should have told me.' He had brought her back a present. He had never said anything about business worries, and now he asked, 'What good would it have done? I didn't want you worrying. Saul was the first man I told.' 'You can trust him?'
'Oh yes.' He sounded confident, and it was too late for her to point out that self-made millionaires usually worked for their own interests. Right now she didn't care much about that. What did make her heart ache was the fact that her father hadn't confided in her, that he had kept all this to himself until he met a man he hadn't seen in fifteen years. Where were his friends? He had so many friends. Some, like accountants and bank managers, were there to advise on business matters. Why couldn't he have turned to someone close at hand rather than a stranger, met by chance in a foreign land?
'You'll be all right now,' he said, and he was smiling. 'It's all working out very well.' 'Is it?'
'Saul thinks it's time he settled down, that he's been a bachelor long enough.' He said this with a twinkle in his eye, as though it was something Charlotte should find interesting. 'I showed him your photograph. He said you were very beautiful, that I must be very proud of you. I think he was half in love with you before he even saw you.'
'Oh no,' she said, she believed her father had shown Saul Laurenson her photograph, probably that first evening when they were dining together and he was pouring out the troubles he had kept to himself till then. And she was photogenic and Saul had said what any man would say to a proud father, but even if he had admired her photograph he hadn't been impressed after he set eyes on her. As for falling in love, with a photograph or a woman, what her father meant by that and what Saul Laurenson would mean were poles apart.
He must be thirty-four now. Perhaps he did feel it was time he was looking around for a wife. He could afford to buy the best, and her stomach clenched with nausea. It was like a slave auction, a cattle market. Was that why her father had been so prejudiced against Jeremy, because he was hoping she would land Saul Laurenson, millionaire at least? Had Saul come here to look her over?
She felt a chill in her bones and said, 'I hope you didn't tell him I'm looking for a husband?'
'Of course not!'
Oh, Jeremy, she thought, Jeremy; and her voice caught in her throat. 'Because when I do I won't be after a tycoon who's decided to go shopping for a wife. That sort would be trading you in for a later model in a few years' time.'
Her father winced, and she knew that he had hoped she would fall in love and that Saul Laurenson would love her. To her father she was the perfect wife for the man who had everything else, and she grinned wryly, 'I'm not that great a bargain, you know, he must know lots of better-looking girls, and between the two of us he's not very taken with me.'
Saul Laurenson didn't want her any more than she wanted him, but her father was distressed enough without having to face another scene, and she said, 'Forget it. Maybe I'll go for a ride.'
'You won't. You're supposed to be resting for twenty-four hours. You could have concussion.'
She had forgotten that. Her head was whirling, but well it might. She said, 'All right, I'll lie down and try to think of some new designs for junk jewellery that Saul Laurenson can flood the market with.'
'You do that,' said her father. His smile was an obvious effort and she wished she could have cheered him up, but his forlorn hope that she might become the rich Mrs Laurenson was the most shaming thing she had ever encountered.
She shrivelled at the thought that the men might have discussed her between them. She didn't suppose for a moment that her father woul
d have issued an invitation, 'Come and see Charlotte, and see if you fancy marrying her,' but he had shown Saul her photograph, and he would have sung her praises, and he'd insisted on her dining with them and going house-hunting with Saul yesterday.
All that must have looked as if she was on offer, and she cringed with embarrassment, curled up on the bed. Then suddenly she jack-knifed up, remembering herself, half naked, coming in from sunbathing. How appalling if he imagined she had done that as a turn-on! He couldn't, no… But she felt as cheapened as though she had been caught scheming away like—like Jo-Ann.
If Jo-Ann heard that Saul was a millionaire and wife-hunting she would be laying siege to the Blue Boar. Maybe Charlotte would tell her, and tell Saul she had told her, then he'd know for sure that Charlotte didn't consider herself a candidate.
If he was shopping for a wife what a cold-blooded arrangement that would be. Love wouldn't enter into it. Sex, of course, he probably wanted sons. Passion maybe, but no closeness that wasn't physical, and she had to see Jeremy tonight, she just had to. The crushed rose she had worn on her velvet robe was lying on the dressing table, and she took it into the bathroom and filled a tumbler with water and put the rose in very gently.
Her car was downstairs in the garage, collected from the Blue Boar, but perhaps she shouldn't drive just yet. She might phone Jeremy and ask him to come here, or she might call a taxi to take her to the theatre.
She wanted to get away for a few hours. Everything here seemed to have gone crazy. It was a madhouse in which she didn't know which way to turn, but if she could be quiet for a while with Jeremy she might get back her sanity.
She phoned for a taxi, to be at the end of the road in fifteen minutes. Then she rang the theatre and left a message telling Jeremy she would see him at his flat. The state she looked, with this great bruise on her forehead, and the way she felt, she couldn't face the rest of the cast and staff at the Little Theatre.
She combed her hair to hide as much damage as possible, put on some lipgloss, picked up her handbag and tried to slip out of the house. If her father or Aunt Lucy caught her she would tell them where she was going, but nobody was going to stop her. Just one more hassle and she would run screaming into the night.
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