nodded. ‘I know, but I’d be prepared to release you, and find another assistant, if you were willing to go to Phoros.’
‘I don’t understand you.’ She spread her hands helplessly.
‘I’m not sure I understand myself,’ he admitted. ‘I only know that I’m tired of the bitterness and enmity, and that this seems a good way to end them once and for all. But if you really feel that you can’t do it, then I won’t press you. The ultimate decision must be yours.’
‘If he’d invited you as well …’ she began, but he cut across her with a wry smile.
‘Now that really would be impossible for all sorts of reasons. It’s you he wants to see—Maria’s daughter.’
‘I feel I’m being blackmailed,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Not very subtle pressure is being applied and I don’t like it.’ Her voice deepened passionately. ‘After all, he didn’t respond when Mother was so ill.’
‘Your mother underplayed the seriousness of the situation, perhaps deliberately, I don’t know. She always made excuses for him and his actions all her life. Perhaps she was letting him down lightly for the last time.’
Helen said, ‘Yes,’ almost absently. Her hand reached for the letter, screwing it into a ball. Her eyes met her father’s in defiance and appeal. ‘I may look like her, Dad, but I haven’t her forgiving nature. He may be a wealthy and powerful man, but he can’t come and go in our lives, just as he pleases.’
‘Are you prepared to tell him so?’ Hugo’s voice was gentle and without censure.
‘I don’t intend to reply at all.’ She tossed the ball of paper into the waste bin. ‘Problem disposed of. Now let’s change to a happier topic. Did you get the message from Paul that I left for you last night?’
‘Yes.’ Her father smiled. ‘And I’ve telephoned him. He’s been working really hard, and the exhibition won’t have to be postponed after all.’
‘It never does have to be postponed,’ Helen smiled in response. ‘It’s just eleventh-hour panic on his part. God knows why. Or you do, perhaps?’
‘I have an idea,’ said Hugo. ‘Though I must admit no one ever clamoured to put on an exhibition of my work.’
Helen gave him an affectionate smile before rising to busy herself clearing the breakfast things from the table. Her father’s work, as far as she could judge, had been competent but not outstanding, but he possessed the eye of a judge, a connoisseur where other people’s painting was concerned. He was also a realistic man, and had recognised quite early in his career that he would probably never earn enough from painting alone to support himself, plus a wife and child. A legacy from an uncle had enabled him to buy a share in a gallery near the West End. The gallery wasn’t doing too well, but Hugo Brandon had changed all that, and within five years he had been able to buy his partner out and replace the gallery’s rather pretentious name with the single word ‘Brandon’. He made a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic and in Europe as a man who could spot a real talent in the making. And Helen had never asked anything better than to join him in his work.
But sometimes she wondered if he ever regretted that it was not his own signature that his customers sought on their canvases. Was he happy, she thought, was he fulfilled, or had he settled for second best? She hoped not, but doubted whether she would ever know the truth.
One thing she had never doubted was his love for her, and for his late wife. But again she wondered if he would have worked quite so hard to make the gallery a success financially as well as artistically if he had not married a rich man’s daughter. Perhaps he had been determined that Maria would never count the cost of all she had given up in order to become his wife.
God, she thought ruefully, as she stacked dishes in the drying rack, everything’s so complicated. Except for my life, she amended hastily.
Helen had enjoyed the year since she had left school. She liked the fact that their flat was sited immediately over the gallery, as well as the work she did there. She was beginning to be a good saleswoman, and learning about art as well, which pleased her. And without being conceited, she was aware that her own attractions—a slim body with rounded breasts and hips, an oval face with high cheekbones, and clear hazel eyes fringed by lashes shades darker than her honey-blonde hair—contributed to her success.
Her mother had been blonde too, but her eyes had been brown like pansies, and full of laughter.
Helen’s eyes darkened too, when she was angry, which was really the only form of passion she had ever encountered. She had never lacked for men to take her out, but her romances so far had been very tentative affairs with little commitment on either side.
Her thoughts for a moment went to Christopher who was taking her out that very evening. She liked him, she enjoyed his kisses even, but something warned her that that was all the involvement she wanted, although she was aware his own desire was for a much closer relationship.
Perhaps in time, she thought, almost absently, then caught at herself. What was she thinking of? Her mother had preached few moral lessons at her, perhaps because she guessed the morality her daughter would be subjected to would be a very different thing from her own sheltered girlhood in Greece, yet one thing she had stressed. Without love, there could not, should not be any giving. And Helen had to admit she could not imagine love blossoming from anything as lukewarm as her present feelings for Christopher. Like most of the other young men who had passed briefly through her life, he was a pleasant companion, but little more.
She sighed faintly. Perhaps this was why their passage was so fleeting. Maybe they turned to other girls for the warmth, the passion she denied them.
But it might also be that she had never yet met anyone who ‘turned her on’, she reminded herself. Perhaps one day she would meet a man, and know that he was the one for her just as her mother had done.
‘I loved him from the first moment that I saw him,’ Maria had told her once, her mouth curving in tender reminiscence. ‘He was sitting on the hillside above the village, painting the view, in the heat of the day without even a hat to protect him from the fierceness of the sun, and I said to him, “Why do you not sit in the shade? The sun will make you ill.” And he turned and smiled at me.’
The young artist had taken her advice, she went on, and from then on she had gone each afternoon to watch the progress of the painting.
‘One day I was late, so late, because Thia Irini had made me help with some sewing. When I got to the place, he was not painting at all, and when he saw me, he jumped up and said, “I was so afraid you weren’t coming and that I wouldn’t see you again.” And then I knew that he loved me also. But I had known first,’ Maria concluded with a look of smiling satisfaction.
How nice to have such certainty, Helen thought, particularly in view of what was to come later.
The news that Maria was to become betrothed to the son of a business acquaintance, a young man only a few years older than her seventeen-year-old self, had burst on the lovers like a bombshell.
Maria had protested to her father that she had never met the young man, but his attitude was inflexible. There would be plenty of opportunities for them to meet, he said. Of course, if they disliked each other, the marriage would not take place. But Maria knew there would be few grounds for dislike. Her father’s choice would not have fallen on someone unsuitable,
