‘Well, I have to go to work in ten minutes but I suppose so.’
‘Ten minutes is all it will take.’
‘I could make a quick cup of coffee,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady, trying for anything that would give her courage.
‘No. No, thank you. These are for you.’ He held out the daisies. ‘I’m going home this afternoon. I...’ he paused ‘...I felt I should come and say goodbye.’
‘Going home—to the UK?’ Her voice seemed to her to come from far off. ‘How long have you known that?’
He shrugged. ‘Weeks. Martha, there are some things——’
But she took the daisies and clenched her fist around the stems. ‘Well! You’re a fine one, aren’t you, mister? In fact I don’t think you’re any better than the dirty old men who pinch me on the bottom.’
‘That’s something I haven’t done, you must admit, Martha,’ he objected wryly.
‘No, you’ve gone a lot further, you must admit, Simon,’ she parodied angrily, ‘and all in the cause of amusing yourself at my expense. If you must know I think you’re a right bastard.’
‘Oh, come on, Martha,’ he said roughly, ‘what did you expect—a diamond bracelet? Or were you trying to hang out for a wedding-ring? Trying,’ he emphasised, ‘not terribly successfully a couple of nights ago.’
The sheer, soul-searing memory of his rejection that night fired her poor abused heart to fury. ‘I hate you,’ she gasped, and slapped his face with all the force she was capable of. ‘What’s more, if all you can afford are daisies——’ she tore some heads off the offending flowers, totally ignoring the fact that she rather liked daisies normally ‘—I’m much better off without you.’
‘I wonder,’ he murmured, and wrested the battered bunch from her grasp, pulled her into his arms and started to kiss her brutally.
‘Oh ...’ she whispered when it was over but could say no more and he didn’t release her.
He said instead, ‘I came here to try to talk some sense into you, Martha. To tell you to stop this dangerous game you’re playing with men, but I guess my earlier conviction was correct—once a tart always a tart.’ He smiled unpleasantly as she moved convulsively in his arms and added, ‘God help any man who does fall in love with you, my little Aussie tart; they’ll probably regret the day they were born.’
He released her then, picked up the remnants of his flowers, closed her hand round the tattered bunch and left.
‘Oh, Martha ...’
Martha came back to the present with a bump as she observed the new tears in Jane’s eyes. ‘Janey,’ she said ruefully, ‘you wanted to know—now you do. And I was supposed to be cheering you up, not the opposite!’
‘But it’s so sad,’ Jane protested.
‘No, it’s not, not any more.’ Martha jumped up suddenly and strode over to the window. ‘I made a fool of myself; I guess we all do that sometimes but I’m much wiser now.’
‘And you just can’t forget him, can you?’ Jane said softly. ‘Is that why there’s been no one else?’
Martha was silent for a long moment, then she said wearily, ‘Jane, wouldn’t you hate to think of yourself reduced to that by a man who was no more in love with you than——? I can’t even think of a comparison. So yes,’ she said shortly, ‘there are some things that are hard to forget.’
‘But you didn’t give him much of a chance to fall in love with you by the sound of it, Martha,’ Jane objected.
‘I wanted him to, though. I can’t tell you how much... Oh, what the hell?’ She turned back from the window defiantly. ‘The thing was, despite all those wild hopes and dreams, do you know why I kept up that appalling act? Because I knew deep down I was so way out of his league that he would never do more than amuse himself with me.’
‘But why?’ Jane asked intensely. ‘You’re beautiful, you’ve got spirit, you’re intelligent, you——’
Martha held up a hand. ‘All that’s——’
‘True!’ Jane insisted.
‘Pretty girls are a dime a dozen,’ Martha said scornfully. ‘If I fell by the wayside no one would even notice. The thing is, in those days I was raw,’ she said baldly. ‘Oh, I don’t mean I was uncultured or uneducated but I was certainly unsophisticated,’ she added impatiently. ‘I had lived all my life on a farm not quite beyond the black stump but not far from it and I only knew about sheep and horses and motorbikes—don’t you see?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Jane replied. ‘Not that I agree with raw, except perhaps in your heart.’ She stopped and waited.
Martha paced around a bit then tossed her long fair hair back with something like a shiver.
. ‘Displaced, dispossessed, dumped in a big city with no qualifications—of course you were raw,’ Jane said quietly. ‘With pain and anger, with a huge chip on your shoulder against life and all those who lived it with wealth and ease and assurance—and hungry for love. You were also nineteen,’ she added prosaically as Martha cast her a look that told her clearly she was verging on the dramatic, then grinned. ‘Don’t forget your hormones, ducky. Every magazine you ever read tells you they can make a girl’s life hell!’
Martha stared down at her, then her beautiful mouth curved into a reluctant smile and she plonked down on the other end of the settee. ‘Promise me something—don’t let’s lose touch——Oh, no,’ she said helplessly as more tears fell but Jane started to laugh through them and protest that this was the final shower...
It was an eight-hour flight to Singapore, then nearly twelve to London, which gave Martha a lot of time to think, and she sighed several times and wished rather devoutly that she hadn’t unburdened herself so to Jane because it had brought it all back and made her wonder how long it would take to forget Simon Macquarie.
I suppose I should take my own words of wisdom to heart, she thought with irony once, and remind myself that if it hadn’t been for him I mightn’t be where I am today. She laid her head back in the dim cabin as the 747 flew through the night and most people slept around her, and acknowledged that as a direct result of that stormy encounter she’d made a pledge to herself that one day she would be the kind of girl a man like Simon Macquarie could fall in love with. Assured, sophisticated, worldly and certainly not a hot-tempered, rash spitfire who had to wear abbreviated clothes to make a living.
Yet it had been clothes that had got her started towards her goals. Not that she’d even considered modelling clothes as her chosen career; it had chosen her one day out of the blue when at yet another wearying cocktail party a young man with a ponytail and two cameras slung round his neck had touched her on the shoulder and told her in broken English that he could make her into the next Elle MacPherson.
He hadn’t, of course. But she’d slowly worked her way into both photographic and catwalk modelling with André Yacob’s help, not only photographically
