‘Now,’ he was saying, ‘we come to the difficult part. There’s a girl out there, a Spanish girl, the wife of one of the managers in our company. She—I—well, without going into details, it has so happened that stories have got to the ears of my grandmother. Living here, in this easygoing society, where all barriers are down, you can have no conception of how parts of Spain are still way back in the past. My dear grandmother is a part of that old, traditional Spain. Her family pride is passionate— overwhelming.’ With wry sadness he added, ‘It’s about the only thing she has left now and she guards it with a certain almost pathetic solemnness. So—she sent for me and asked me to deny the stories she had heard.’
He was silent, looking out across the neglected garden, his dark eyes sombre.
‘And did you? Deny it, I mean?’ Chloe asked. She had almost forgotten the reason he was telling her this story.
He looked up at her, his eyes flashing suddenly, and she saw again the flamboyance of his Spanish forebears in the proud tilt of his head. ‘Naturally I denied it,’ he said. ‘If I had allowed her to believe that I’d let down the family honour in any way I truly think it would have killed her. She accepted my word that there was no question of some attempt at divorce or anything like that, but I could tell that she was still uneasy. So I did the only thing I could think of that would make her happy: I told her that I’d just become engaged to a girl in England.’ A reminiscent smile pulled at his mouth. ‘That finally did the trick. Grandmother was thrilled—I could see her mentally counting her great-grandchildren. Poor sweet,’ he added, his mouth softening. ‘I’m afraid she’s going to be disappointed on that point. I’ve no ambitions to become a family man.’
Chloe was silent. She saw the whole picture now. ‘It’s not a very attractive story,’ she said.
He stood up and stood looking down the garden, his back to her. ‘Maybe not,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘Nevertheless, I have to find a girl who will take the risk of marrying me.’
He had left his leather coat in the car and his back looked very straight under the silky beige shirt he wore. He had a superb body, Chloe noted absently, almost classically perfect. Broad shoulders, a slim waist and hips, long legs whose strength couldn’t be altogether hidden under the light trousers. The sun slanted in under the roof of the verandah, touching his head where the dark hair curled behind his ears. She remembered that first moment she had seen him, when she had thought that he was the most stunningly attractive man she had ever encountered. For a moment she allowed herself to wonder how she would feel if this were a real proposal of marriage. If he had said, ‘I love you.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said, suddenly cool, ‘that you won’t have any difficulty in finding someone.’
He swung round to face her. ‘Possibly not. But I’m asking rather a lot, you see, and I’m in rather a hurry. I’m looking for a girl who is attractive, intelligent, articulate, preferably with a business training, who can take an interest in my work and help me when I’m at home, who will make a charming hostess when I entertain my business colleagues here. In other words’—he grinned down at her—‘you.’
Chloe raised delicately marked brows. She was determined to play this cool if it killed her. ‘In other words— a slave.’
A gleam came into his eyes. ‘Not a bit of it. A partner. It would be a fifty-fifty arrangement. Certainly not a slave.’
‘And what would you be offering in return?’ Not that she was interested, of course. She just wanted to know what he would say.
‘A share in everything I have to do. Freedom within the limits of loyalty. What I’m not offering is any sort of emotional involvement, I can promise you that. That’s one reason why I hoped you might consider my offer.’
‘Your—your outrageous offer,’ Chloe said slowly.
‘If it seems like that to you. Although I should have thought you would have seen the plain common sense of it. I gathered from your sister that you’ve had your fill, recently, of emotional involvement. I certainly have. Two reasonable people, with their minds fixed on other things than love, should be able to make a go of it. You’d have the fun of seeing Woodcotes restored to life. You’d have a job, as my personal assistant, with as generous an allowance as you needed. I’d have—well, all the things I’ve just mentioned. Plus the enormous relief of knowing that my grandmother’s mind was at rest.’
‘And how long would this—this arrangement be supposed to last?’
‘As long as my grandmother lives,’ he said promptly. ‘She’s eighty-six. Or until the end of the necessary two-year period before a marriage can be ended, should she not live as long as that.’
Chloe had had enough. She got to her feet and stood very straight. ‘I never heard of such a cold-blooded arrangement in my life,’ she said. ‘A marriage without love—’
‘But with friendship? Liking? Or is that too much to ask?’
‘I don’t think I could like a man who could marry a girl when he was in love with someone else,’ she said.
‘I thought I mentioned that love doesn’t enter into this anywhere.’ His face was suddenly grim. ‘You’re looking for a job. I’m offering you one. Better than a job—a business partnership.’ He stuck his hands deep into his pockets. ‘No demands would be made on you, I would promise that,’ he drawled.
Chloe felt the heat rising from her toes up to her cheeks.
‘I think I’d like to go home,’ she said.
They didn’t talk much on the way back. When Dane pulled the car up outside the little semi with the bright front garden Chloe said automatically, ‘Won’t you come in? Jan…’
But he shook his head. ‘Not now, thanks. Present my apologies.’
They sat there in silence. It seemed like an anti-climax, but after all, what more was there to say? He had made the offer of a job and she had turned it down, and that was all there was to it. She pressed the handle down on her side, but the door didn’t move.
‘It goes up,' he said, and leaned across to open the door. Chloe tried to squeeze herself back against the seat to avoid the pressure of his arm against her body, but she couldn’t quite manage it. Briefly, under the thin silk of his shirt, she felt the muscles tense as he brushed against her breast.
The door was open now and she almost fell out. ‘Well, thanks for the offer,’ she said, and her mouth was dry. ‘Sorry the answer had to be—’
To her amazement he leaned out of the open car door and covered her mouth with his hand. ‘Don’t say it,’ he smiled. ‘Don’t say no. At least ponder on it until tomorrow. Sleep on it, as they say, it might look different when you wake up.’ He slammed the door shut. ‘Till tomorrow, Chloe,’ he said, and reversed the car neatly and roared away down the short road.
The front door was unlocked and Chloe went in. Jan was coming out of the kitchen in a pink nylon overall. ‘Well?’ she asked brightly, hopefully. ‘Any luck?’
Chloe said, ‘He offered me a job. Did he tell you what it was?’
‘No, but I should think any job that man offered would be quite something.’
‘It was,’ Chloe said slowly. ‘Quite something.’
Emma came hurtling through the side door from the garden, still clutching her Spanish doll. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded, looking behind Chloe as if Benedict Dane might be hiding there. When she saw he wasn’t her lower lip began to quiver. ‘Mummy, you said he’d come back with Auntie Chloe.’
Jan met Chloe’s eyes questioningly. ‘I thought he would, love, but I expect he had to go to his office.’
Easy tears welled into Emma’s wide grey eyes. She looked touchingly small and vulnerable standing there in her pleated grey skirt and the red jumper that Jan had just finished knitting. Chloe went down on one knee and encircled the thin little body. ‘Don’t cry, pet,’ she said. ‘He’s coming back tomorrow.’
Emma sniffed and choked a little. ‘Promise?’ and Chloe promised. If Benedict Dane said he would come back tomorrow, then he would, but her heart lurched uncomforta
bly at the thought.
‘All right,’ conceded Emma reluctantly. Chloe looked up at Jan and she was smiling in a satisfied sort of way. She, too, evidently considered that it was all right. This evening, when the children were in bed, she would have to be disillusioned.
It wasn’t going to be easy to explain things to Jan. Jan was an optimist and a dreamer. It always amazed Chloe how she could still believe in romantic meetings and happy endings. Jan’s own dreams had come upon a sticky patch just now, but that didn’t stop her from dreaming for other people.
‘Now, tell me all about it,’ she said when the chaos of bath-time was over, the children settled down, and the two girls had carried coffee, biscuits and cheese, and a bowl of apples into the sitting room and sunk wearily into easy chairs. ‘I can’t wait to hear your news about the job. I thought from what Mr Dane said that it would be somewhere near here. Isn’t that lucky—so that you’ll be able to stay on with us? Will it be secretarial again, or is it something more interesting—I’ve always felt it was such a shame that you had to waste your training and everything just bashing a typewriter, and—’ In the act of buttering a water biscuit, she looked up, saw Chloe’s face, and stopped. ‘Oh, gosh—wasn’t it—isn’t it…?’
Chloe shook her head and pursed her lips. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid it isn’t.’
‘He didn’t offer you a job? But he said—’
‘Oh, he offered me a job, but I had to turn it down.’ Jan looked utterly dashed. ‘Oh, love, what a shame!’ She poured a cup of coffee. ‘Here, drink this and tell me about it.’
There was no way of not telling. It would never have occurred to Jan that the whole matter could have got so personal in just twenty-four hours that Chloe wouldn’t want to tell her about it. The best thing was to make it into a joke. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she began. And she recounted everything—or nearly everything— that had happened, while Jan listened, munching biscuits, her eyes fixed on Chloe’s face.
‘Crazy, isn’t it?’ finished Chloe. ‘The utter gall of the man, imagining I’d fall in with a suggestion like that! Crazy!’ She looked over at Jan, sipping coffee in silence. ‘Isn’t it?’
Jan put down her cup carefully. ‘Yes, love, I expect so.’
‘You don’t think—you don’t imagine for a moment that I could possibly…?’ The younger girl’s voice rose to a squeak.
‘No, no, of course not,’ said Jan hastily. ‘It was only that I was just thinking…’
‘Yes?’
‘I mean, he must love his grandmother very much to want to take all this trouble just to make her happy.’ Jan’s eyes were very bright. ‘There’s something rather— rather touching about it.’
‘Oh, Jan!’ Chloe sighed deeply. ‘You are an old sentimentalist, aren’t you? There’s probably far more in it than that. He probably has expectations from the old lady’s will and doesn’t want to offend her.’ She did her best to sound cynical and tough, and was rather surprised to find that she didn’t believe in the suggestion she had just made.
Jan was smiling. ‘Why are you so intent on not liking the man, love?’
‘I don’t either like him or not like him. I just think he’s got a terrific nerve, that’s all.’ Chloe bit firmly into a yellow apple. She waited for Jan to say something else, to say of course Chloe couldn’t agree to marry a perfect stranger, not under any circumstances. But Jan just went on munching biscuits, one after the other, as if she hardly knew what she was doing, and said nothing at all.
At last Chloe had to speak. ‘Jan, you don’t think— surely you’re not going to encourage me to even consider this crazy thing?’
Jan looked a bit startled. ‘No, of course I’m not, love. It’s your show. But—’
‘Yes?’ Suddenly what Jan thought was important.
‘It’s just that he seems such a—a super sort of man in every way.’ She smiled faintly. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, that this should happen so soon after what you said—that you’d be looking for a very special sort of man. Well, he is, isn’t he?’
Chloe’s soft mouth twisted. ‘Tall and dark. Handsome and rich. Kind and generous. Likes children and dumb animals. Crackling with sex appeal. Oh yes, he’s a special sort of man, all right. Unfortunately he doesn’t happen to be in love with me.’
Jan replaced the lid on the biscuit box. Then she said, rather sadly, ‘Sometimes I ask myself how far love gets one. It leaves one horribly—vulnerable.’
Emma’s voice, from upstairs, called, ‘Mummy— Mummy—can I have a drink of water?’
Jan sighed, pulling a face, and Chloe jumped up. ‘I’ll go to her. You look tired, love, you stay where you are. You’re not over that ’flu bug yet, you know. And you really should get to bed early.’
Jan nodded, a little dispiritedly. ‘I think perhaps I will. Unless you’d like to talk over this thing some more?’
Chloe, in the doorway, called, ‘Coming, sweetie!’ Then she looked back over her shoulder at her sister. ‘No, there really isn’t anything else to talk over. I’ve already said No, and when he comes back tomorrow I’ll say it again, only a bit louder.’
That couldn’t be literally true, of course. She couldn’t just say a blank No. She lay awake for a long time that night, considering how she was going to persuade Benedict Dane that she meant what she said. From what she had seen of him up to now she was quite convinced that, even more than most men, he wasn’t easily going to give up something he had set his mind on. (They weren’t talking about hearts, were they?)
It was all very well for Jan to find something touching in his solicitude for his grandmother, but she, Chloe, certainly didn’t. If he wanted to carry on some affair with a married woman then he should have thought about that before he started, she told herself censoriously. She kept straying off the point by trying to picture what the woman in question looked like, and visions of flashing Spanish beauties with red lips and sinuous bodies kept coming into her mind so that she became even more angry and thumped the pillows viciously in a vain attempt to decide what to say to him tomorrow. At last she went off to sleep, about half past two, without having come to any conclusion. She would just have to play it by ear, she told herself on a final huge, sleepy yawn, when he turned up.
After which, it was a decided anti-climax when he didn’t turn up.
‘He did say he’d come today?’ demanded Jan for the fifth or sixth time when half-past eight in the evening arrived and there had been no sign of him. She had worked out a meal that could be produced speedily and would serve as either lunch or supper, according to when Benedict Dane put in an appearance.
‘Oh yes, he said so, but perhaps I misunderstood.’ Chloe looked up from the magazine she had been leafing through with a fine show of unconcern. ‘It really doesn’t matter, I expect he thought better of his offer.’
Jan frowned at the pair of small rompers she was examining for loose buttons. ‘I’d have thought he would have rung up, at least. He didn’t strike me as a casual type. I mean, why should he have gone to all that bother yesterday—and bringing that lovely doll for Emma and the bricks for James? He must have wanted to—to…’
Chloe threw down the magazine and stood up. ‘Oh, I’m quite sure he wanted to make use of us—of me. And then when he found he wasn’t going to get what he wanted he was up and away. That’s how men seem to function, and I really couldn’t care less. Let’s have supper, shall we?’ she added in a voice that put a full stop to their discussion of Benedict Dane and his possible motives.
But as they went into the kitchen Jan muttered in a puzzled voice, ‘I can’t understand—I’m sure he’ll get in touch…’
Chloe, following, bestowed an indulgent glance upon her sister’s soft fair head and pluropish form. Dear old Jan, she never gave up. Still believed in the happy ending in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ she said, ‘I’m off to Coventry to get a job. I’m sure to find something there. And don’t let’s talk about
Mr Dane any more. Let’s put him right out of our minds.’
It should have been easy, Chloe told herself as she parked the car in Coventry next day, to do just that. After all, the whole event was over and done with. The fabulous Mr Dane had thought better of his offer, or perhaps remembered some more suitable candidate for the job. It really did not concern her in the least. She would wait for the Evening Telegraph to come on to the streets at about midday and then she would have an up-to-date selection of Situations Vacant.
Meanwhile she wandered round the huge circular market, smelling of oranges and fresh vegetables, and the sight and the smell reminded her of Woodcotes and Percy Croker coming into the kitchen bursting with pride over the plump white leeks and crisp January King cabbages he had produced in the garden. The kitchen garden was a wilderness now, but soon it would be cleared and tamed and brought back into production, she felt sure. Benedict Dane would find somebody to cope with it; you could always find staff if you had the money.
But why was she thinking about him again, for goodness’ sake? Impatiently she turned away from the centre stalls to those around the outside, and bought a picture book for Emma and a fat red ball for James. Paying for these showed her just how little money she had in her purse. She would have to find the local office of her building society and draw out enough to see her through the next week. She certainly couldn’t allow Jan to go on supporting her out of the allowance from her husband.
She found the building society office in Corporation Street and drew out ten pounds. The size of the balance remaining did nothing to cheer her up. It was quite evident that a good-paying job was becoming of prime importance. Having bought a paper, she made her way into the shopping precinct, climbed the stairs in ‘Elizabeth’s’ and there, with a coffee and an extravagantly luscious chocolate eclair to bolster her confidence, she started to scan the Situations Vacant column.
A Very Special Man Page 7
