‘Did he do that?’ Cassandra shook her head. ‘You really don’t like him, do you?’ She paused. ‘What does he do anyway?’
Liz stared at her disbelievingly. ‘You must have heard of him!’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘But I assumed you’d recognised his name.’ Liz sighed. ‘He’s quite famous—or notorious, whatever way you look at it. He writes for the Post. He’s one of their correspondents, generally overseas—when he’s not in London, making it with every rich bird in town!’
Cassandra’s wide forehead furrowed. ‘Oh—yes, I seem to remember reading something about him.’
‘You would,’ agreed Liz grimly. ‘I told you, he’s bad news. So don’t go getting any ideas about him, because believe me, you’d regret it.’
Cassandra felt a recurring twinge of resentment. ‘Liz, I am over twenty-one. And I was married for five years. I know how to look after myself.’
‘Mike Roland was a choirboy compared to Jay Ravek,’ Liz retorted, turning up the collar of her fur jacket. ‘Take my word for it, kid. You don’t need another bad experience.’
Walking back to the studio in a mews off Great Portland Street, Cassandra had plenty of time to mull over the things Liz had said. She meant well, Cassandra supposed, but the ten years’ seniority Liz possessed always gave her the edge. They had known one another for more than seven years. They had met at an exhibition just like this one. But Cassandra couldn’t help wishing Liz would not always treat her as if she was incapable of handling her own life. She had made mistakes, of course, and her disastrous marriage to Mike Roland was still uppermost in her mind. But Mike was dead now, after all the heartache it had caused her, that period of her life was over and she badly wanted to forget it. Liz’s frequent references to her marriage prevented her from doing so, continually reminding her of her declared determination not to be fooled again. What Liz didn’t appear to understand was that just because she had had a bad time with Mike, and had no desire to repeat the experience, it did not mean she could not find the opposite sex attractive. She did. Or at least, some members of it. And Jay Ravek was certainly a very attractive member . . .
She found Chris Allen hunched over his drawing board when she entered the offices of Ro-Allen Interiors some fifteen minutes later. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and the inevitable cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth. Cassandra breathed a sigh of protest and marched to the windows, flinging them wide despite the chilling afternoon air, and her partner turned to her resignedly, pressing the stub of the cigarette out in the dish already overflowing beside him.
‘You’ll kill yourself with those filthy things!’ exclaimed Cassandra, taking off her coat and hanging it on one of a row of hooks screwed to the wall behind her desk.
‘It’s my life,’ observed Chris laconically, sliding off his stool. ‘We can’t all be invited to champagne receptions, hobnobbing with the crème de la crème! Besides,’ he fumbled in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes, placing a fresh one between his lips, ‘they help me to concentrate, and right now, I need some inspiration.’
Cassandra, seated at her desk, looked up at the young man before her with grudging affection. She knew how hard he was working to make the business a success, and Liz had not been joking when she said he had a brilliant eye for colour. If Cassandra’s abilities lay in looking at a room and being able to judge its potentialities, Chris’s talent was for colouring her work, giving it life and beauty. His was the skill that combined furniture with fabric, and substantiated her spartan drawings with light and detail. At twenty-five, he was precisely ten months older than she was, and their association came from way back, when Cassandra, like him, was a student at the London School of Textile Design. Those were the days before Mike Roland came into her life, when she had still been uncertain of what she really wanted to do. At least her marriage to Mike had taught her that that kind of one-to-one relationship was not what she wanted, and although she would not have wished him dead, her freedom seemed particularly precious to her now.
‘So—–’ Chris flicked his lighter and applied it to the end of his cigarette. ‘Was there anybody interesting at the reception? What did you think of Stafford’s work?’
Cassandra chose to answer his second question first. ‘Quite frankly, I thought his paintings were horrible,’ she admitted candidly. ‘I didn’t like them, and I certainly didn’t understand them.’
‘Shades of Hieronymus Bosch,’ remarked Chris drily, putting his lighter away, and at her look of incomprehension, he added: ‘He was a Dutch painter of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, I’m not sure which. But his work was very pessimistic, and I’ve heard it said that Stafford’s is the same.’
Cassandra’s lips twitched. ‘You’re very well informed.’
‘Not really.’ Chris made a deprecatory gesture. ‘He had a marvellous use of colour, which I admire, and which no one else has successfully been able to imitate. And besides,’ he shrugged irrepressively, ‘I watched a programme about him on television, a couple of nights ago.’
Cassandra made a face and flung a pencil at him as Chris ducked back to his drawing board. He laughed and resumed his seat, and leaving her own, Cassandra came to look over his shoulder.
‘Hey, that’s good!’ she exclaimed, pulling her spectacles out of their case and sliding them on to her nose so that she could look more closely. She had discovered she was long-sighted only two months before, when after a series of headaches she had sought professional advice. In consequence, she now wore wide hornrims when she was working, and their size gave an added charm to her pale oval features.
Chris glanced sideways at her, his blue eyes alight with enthusiasm. ‘Do you think so?’ he asked. ‘Do you really think so? You don’t think I’ve gone over the top with all this dark oak and heavy wallpaper?’
‘Of course not.’ Cassandra straightened, smiling down into his lean good-looking features. ‘Chris, they told us what they wanted. They want us to restore the house’s original character. They want oak panelling and figured damask. They want velvet curtains and leather-bound books in the library.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t suppose it really matters what the books are. You could put The Decameron up there, and they’d never notice. But,’ she grimaced, ‘so long as they’re happy, and they’re prepared to pay for it—who are we to object?’
Chris pulled thoughtfully at his nose, a habit he had when he was worried, and then looked doubtfully up at her. ‘Is that really how you feel?’ he asked, with sudden gravity, and she turned away and walked back to her desk, as if she needed to consider her response.
‘No,’ she conceded at last, perching on the edge of her desk and chewing at the earpiece of the spectacles she had removed from her nose. ‘But, Chris,’ she sighed, ‘we can only offer advice. If people refuse to take it . . .’
‘I don’t like these kind of jobs,’ declared Chris flatly. ‘I prefer it when we’re given a free hand to use the ability that they’re paying for!’
‘Well, so do I,’ exclaimed Cassandra impatiently. ‘But we’re not in business to create works of art, Chris. And every now and then we have to take a job we don’t like.’
Chris hunched his shoulders. ‘Well, why the hell did the Steiners employ a firm of interior designers, if they already knew what they wanted? Why didn’t they just contract the job
