‘Everyone would think we were lovers. If not honeymooners.’
He shrugged. ‘So?’
That deadly indifference again, thought Kit.
‘You don’t care, do you?’ she said, marvelling.
‘Why should I?’
‘Because it’s not true,’ she shouted, suddenly overcome. ‘This crazy place! It’s a fantasy world and every damned person here buys into it. Rose petals and lovers’ hideaways and lining paper with wedding bells in the drawers.’
‘What?’ said Philip, pardonably confused.
She squared up to him, like Lisa in one of her most virulent terrier moods.
‘Do you know what they would call us, the boatmen and the waiters and the chambermaids? The Englishman and his bride, that’s what. His bride.’
His smile was lopsided.
‘What’s wrong with that?’
Kit didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
He took a step forward. His voice dropped. It was like a caress. ‘Would it be so bad to be the Englishman’s bride?’ tempted Philip Hardesty alluringly.
Kit felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. She could not speak. She felt her face whitening. The garden began to spin. She put an uncertain hand out to steady herself. There was nothing to hang on to. She staggered.
Philip caught her.
She rounded on him.
‘Let go of me! You don’t have any respect for me at all, do you?’ It was a croak.
Philip was startled. ‘That’s just stupid.’
‘Don’t call me stupid,’ flashed Kit.
‘I didn’t,’ he said, thoroughly confused. ‘I mean, I did but not like that. Kit, you’ve got to listen to me—’
‘Leave me alone,’ said Kit between her teeth, ‘or I will make the scene of the century.’
He did not, of course. He took her by the shoulders. And Kit broke out into peal upon peal of horrible laughter.
Lisa came running down the path. One look at Kit’s face and she put a sustaining arm round her.
‘It’s all right. I’ll look after her,’ she said to Philip with finality.
He let Kit go reluctantly.
And then, most fortunately, the helicopter arrived.
Kit bundled up her roll-bag with clumsy hands and fled for it, Lisa pounding after her.
She leaned into the helicopter as the pilot stowed Kit’s luggage and strapped her in. Her pretty face was worried.
‘Kit, what is it?’
‘I’m getting out of here,’ said Kit. She sounded lethal. ‘And, once I’ve done it, never, ever mention this place to me again.’
CHAPTER SIX
KIT was glad that she had the spring-cleaning job to do in Pimlico. She really needed to be on her own while she returned to equilibrium. She passed on the war poetry, though. It made her cry. So she took some Spanish language tapes with her instead.
By the time the week was over, the house gleamed and Kit knew enough to join a Spanish conversation class.
‘At last,’ said Tatiana with grudging approval.
Lisa came back from Coral Cove alone. In spite of her tan, she looked peaky.
‘Oh, I had another argument with Nikolai,’ she said when Kit asked about him. ‘He’s gone off to watch apes. I don’t know where and I don’t care.’
‘Oh, Lisa, what happened? You seemed so happy together.’
Lisa shrugged, her brightly painted mouth hard. ‘That’s the way it goes.’
Kit began to be worried. ‘What did you argue about this time?’
Lisa shrugged. ‘You, as a matter of fact.’
‘Me?’ Kit could not believe it. ‘Why on earth?’
‘I take it that Philip Hardesty was Mr First Night?’
Kit flushed.
‘Thought so. Well, he wanted your address. Nikolai thinks he’s a good guy and was all for giving it to him. I said no.’ She spread her scarlet-tipped nails. ‘We have lift-off.’
‘Oh, no.’ Kit was full of remorse. ‘I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have to fight about me.’
Lisa gave a deep sigh. ‘Hell, Kitten, we’re fighting all the time at the moment. If it wasn’t about you, it would be about something else. Don’t worry about it. Thank God Nikolai has got his apes and I’ve got a new job. With a bit of luck, if we don’t see too much of each other for a while, we’ll weather the storm.’
‘And if you don’t?’ asked Kit guiltily.
Lisa lifted her chin. ‘Then we’re another statistic.’ Her voice was steely.
Kit bit her lip.
‘Don’t look like that,’ said Lisa, softening. She gave her sister a quick hug. ‘I’m not like Mother. I’ll survive just fine.’
After that, by common consent, neither of them talked about Coral Cove again. Even when they met for their monthly Sunday lunch at their mother’s home in the country, they both talked hard about the sun, sand and sea. Neither once mentioned a man’s name.
‘All right,’ said Flora Stevens, Kit’s godmother, who was also invited that Sunday. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’
They were emptying the smart dishwasher that Lisa had bought their mother years earlier and she only ever used when the girls were home. It was Kit’s personal theory that her mother did not really know how to use it unaided.
Kit put the large dinner plates into the china cupboard. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You and Lisa are being so discreet it makes the eardrums twang,’ Flora said frankly. ‘Even your mother has noticed and that’s saying something. Did you have a little waltz round the block with Nikolai?’
‘Flora!’ Kit was genuinely shocked.
‘He’s an attractive man,’ said Flora, unrepentant. ‘And with Lisa behaving like a shrew, who could blame him?’
‘Me,’ said Kit firmly and ungrammatically. But she frowned. ‘She is being—well, odd. Isn’t she?’
Flora looked wise. ‘Maybe,’ she said infuriatingly. ‘So who was the man you tangled with?’
‘You’re like the Spanish Inquisition,’ said Kit, harassed. ‘Does there have to be a man?’
‘When you look as if you’re on another planet half the time, that’s the usual explanation, yes. In your case, you’ve stopped jumping every time you pass a mirror. I’d say that clinched it.’
Kit stared, not sure whether to laugh or run. In the end she said with feeling, ‘The Spanish Inquisition was an understatement.’
Flora stroked the fall of golden hair affectionately. ‘All right. I won’t ask any more.’
‘That’s just as well. Because there’s nothing to tell.’
Flora looked at her searchingly. ‘You all right with this?’
Kit did not pretend to misunderstand. She had a bad history with rejection and Flora was one of the few people apart from Lisa and her mother who knew it.
‘I’m not locking myself in my room and refusing to eat, if that’s what you’re asking,’ she said drily.
‘I wasn’t,’ Flora said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘That was an episode and it’s over. I know your mother still gets wound up about it, but that’s Joanne for you. You said you were over it three years ago and I believe you. But you could still be hurt now. Are you?’
Kit swallowed suddenly. ‘Yes.’
Flora nodded. ‘And it’s hopeless?’
Kit made a clumsy, despairing gesture, more eloquent than words.
‘Fair enough,’ said Flora, relenting. ‘No more questions. But if this hopeless case of yours turns up again, bring him to see me. I’m intrigued by a man who can stop you running away from mirrors.’
Kit pulled a face. But on the way back in Lisa’s sports car, she said thoughtfully, ‘I think I’d like a mirror for the hall. One of those big Gothic jobs that you see Dracula in.’
Lisa sent her a quick surprised look. But all she said was, ‘We can look next weekend.’
They found one in the Portobello street market and had a hysterical Sunday afternoon manhandling it onto the wall, directed by Tatiana
.
‘This is all wrong, two young girls putting up a great thing like that,’ Tatiana scolded. ‘Top left corner up half an inch, no more. Yes, it is ridiculous. You need a man.’
As one the sisters said, ‘No, we don’t.’
And looked at each other and laughed.
Apart from that, though, Kit did not see much of Lisa. The new job took Lisa travelling a lot and Kit was out nearly every night, between her driving lessons and her burgeoning social life.
The Spanish classes had led, somewhat improbably, to a salsa evening. Kit found she liked dancing and she was good at it. Several of the Spanish class signed up for tango lessons.
Two months before, Kit would not have gone. She could not have borne to throw away the multiple layers she used to conceal her body. She would never have dreamed of stripping down to a leotard and swirling skirt.
Now all those old inhibitions seemed stupid. She stopped everyday on her way out to work and looked at herself in the mirror deliberately. Even after her faint tan had faded, she did not look too bad, she thought. Tall, slim, golden hair gleaming with health, wide open grey-green eyes—it could all be a lot worse. After all, everyone else had to look at it. She might as well look too. Sometimes she even applied make-up.
She even enjoyed dancing with partners. Oh, she still didn’t date. But she did not freak every time a man put his hands on her any more. These days she knew that physical touch was just that, a brief bridge between person and person.
Of course, there was the touch that hooked your heart out of you on a pin and then stabbed it to the core. But that could presumably not happen twice. So she did not have to worry about that any more.
She took more of an interest in international affairs. She started buying a broadsheet newspaper and turning to the international pages. She even went to the library and surfed the internet.
Lots of sites described the achievements of Philip Hardesty. By contrast Soralaya Khan only got three mentions that Kit could find. She was Brooks Bank’s oil expert and had written a learned paper on the movement of international oil prices. She had been interviewed by a satellite news service when one of the Gulf states cut their oil output. And she had been to a ball.
The ball was a charity function. Soralaya was a committee member. That had to be why she merited so many photographs in all the reports, Kit decided. The fact that she looked like a film star was just a bonus.
For Soralaya Khan was a beauty. She was tall and thin as a rail. As a result, her outrageously revealing white lace dress looked striking instead of tarty. In addition to a model girl’s figure she had an elaborate pile of lustrous dark hair, a voluptuous scarlet-painted mouth and either perfect skin or the best cosmetics in the universe.
Mind you, she could afford the best cosmetics in the universe, thought Kit. Along with her degrees and her influential ex-boyfriends, more than one society page listed her rich relations. There were plenty of them to list. Soralaya Khan was oil on both sides of the family.
Kit logged off and went home telling herself how glad she was that she had not gone on that alluring honeymoon cruise with Philip Hardesty. Soralaya was not the sort of competition any woman in her right mind could expect to stand up to.
Besides, there had been one photograph—just one—of her with Philip. He had been wearing a dinner jacket and that cool, remote look Kit recognised. Maybe he hadn’t been in a very good mood when the photograph was taken, she thought. It didn’t make any difference—they were still the perfect couple. Both so tall, so spectacularly good-looking, so groomed. Tatiana’s black and silver glitter and Lisa’s crystal earrings could not begin to make it into that class.
Yes, it was just as well that Kit was not expecting to see Philip Hardesty again. And she wasn’t. She wasn’t.
Winter turned to spring. Kit sniffed the blossom on the trees in the private gardens behind the house and announced to Tatiana that she was thinking of buying some new clothes.
‘Better and better,’ said Tatiana, her eyes gleaming with missionary fervour. ‘A green-eyed blonde ought to be stunning. Do you want company when you go shopping?’
And, laughing, Kit had to admit that she wouldn’t mind.
There were only two things that Kit did which were not entirely constructive, Tatiana remarked, on the telephone to Lisa in Zurich. She left the answering machine on all the time, so that she could screen her calls. And she ran to the post every morning with a look of dread. Whatever she dreaded never arrived, clearly. So then she went back down to her flat looking disappointed.
‘It is undoubtedly a man,’ said Tatiana serenely.
Lisa did not share her complacence. She knew how deep Kit could fall into despair if she was in love and her love was rejected. Not that there was any evidence that she was in love, of course, in spite of what Nikolai said. ‘You try to wrap that girl in cotton wool,’ he had flung at her in that terminal row. ‘But has it ever occurred to you that maybe she needs to work this thing out with Hardesty without the female mafia taking a hand?’
Only Nikolai had not seen Kit sitting on the floor of her bedroom rocking when her tearaway boyfriend had decided she was surplus to requirements.
‘Is she—you know—all right?’ she asked, wincing at the memory.
‘She is more like a twenty-two-year-old than I have ever seen her. A tragic love affair,’ said Tatiana largely, ‘can be a great source of imaginative stimulus.’
Lisa stopped wincing, snorted with derision and rang off.
Tatiana was hurt. She was pleased with her remark, which had been quite spontaneous. So she repeated it to Kit when they set out on their shopping expedition.
Kit stared at her for a full thirty seconds before saying, ‘Gee, thanks. You’re a great comfort.’
Tatiana was not good at picking up irony. ‘Women should always have some experience of heartbreak. It gives them mystery.’
Kit exploded into laughter. ‘Come along, you old mountebank. I’m not playing the Lady of Camellias. I just want some summer clothes.’
Tatiana was curious. ‘Are you saying your heart is not broken?’
If she had learned one thing from deceptive Philip Hardesty it was the use of evasion, thought Kit. When Tatiana had tried to grill her before she went to Coral Cove, Kit had either run away or got hopelessly flustered.
Now she just said calmly, ‘Broken or not, my heart is no concern of yours, Tatiana.’
The older woman looked delighted. ‘I look forward to meeting him.’
Even that did not draw Kit. ‘Nice try,’ she said ironically. ‘Now leave it alone. Or I’ll go shopping on my own.’
‘No, no. You will get terrible colours and skirts to your ankles,’ said Tatiana with some justice, based on the evidence. ‘I will come. And we will not speak of this mystery lover until you want to.’
Philip sat quietly in the comfortable armchair and waited for the verdict. The specialist had the best reputation in New York. But Philip did not expect good news.
The ophthalmologist sat down on the corner of his desk and drummed with his pen on the file he had been studying.
‘Well?’ said Philip. ‘Don’t be afraid to tell me. I can deal with it, whatever it is.’
The ophthalmologist nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said absently. ‘If I knew what to tell you.’ He sucked his teeth. ‘Truth is—this is a real puzzle. I’ll be honest, Sir Philip. I don’t know what’s going on here.’
Philip frowned. This sounded like honesty, not some unnecessary softening to let the patient down lightly. ‘What do you mean?’
‘This occasional blindness in your left eye. I can see it. I know it’s happening. It’s not psychosomatic. I can track it. But—there’s no physical reason for it.’
‘What?’ It was the last thing Philip had expected.
‘It comes at random. That’s unusual. No obvious signals, either before or during the episode. You said that no one else has even noticed?’
‘That’s right.’
�
�You see, that’s even more unusual.’ The doctor folded his arms. ‘Best explanation I can give you, right? It’s as if your eye is shutting down. It needs to rest, so it rests. It just stops seeing.’
Philip considered. ‘That doesn’t sound likely.’
The doctor grinned. ‘You’re right. It’s crazy. But—not impossible. Very rare but not unheard of. I’ve turned up a couple of dozen cases worldwide.’
Philip digested this. ‘So, what’s the prognosis?’
‘Depends what the underlying cause is. If it’s stress, there’s a good chance you’ll get your sight back in full. As long as you stop doing whatever it is that’s causing the stress, of course.’
He encountered Philip’s cool displeasure and his grin widened.
‘Like my job?’ asked Philip politely.
‘Hey, you said it, not me.’
Philip looked down his nose. ‘It is such an easy target.’
The doctor got off the corner of his desk. ‘Up to you. You do what you want. There’s no procedure and no medication. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I told you different.’
Philip had to acknowledge the truth of that. He shifted in the chair and said ruefully, ‘Sorry. I ought to know about telling people truths they don’t want to hear.’ He gave his sudden, glinting smile. ‘It’s part of my job too.’
The doctor softened to that smile the way everyone did. Or everyone but Kit Romaine, thought Philip. The elusive Kit Romaine, on whom three separate lines of enquiry had drawn a blank so far.
‘Look, it’s none of my business. But you’ve obviously been pushing yourself for years. Why don’t you just let up a bit?’
Philip sighed. ‘Live for today?’ he said drily. ‘Somebody was telling me to do just that only recently.’
The doctor shrugged. ‘You could try it.’
Philip laughed suddenly. ‘Only if I have a character transplant.’
‘Then there’s nothing else I can think of. Carry on like this and my guess is, it will get worse.’
‘Thank you,’ said Philip. He stood up and shook hands.
But he was still smiling when he walked out of the building.
Live for today. Was it possible?
Maybe it was, if he found his unicorn girl again. But so far his assistant’s researches had turned up nothing. And he had not had time to look for himself.
Englishman's Bride (9781460366332) Page 12
