Fast Friends (35 page)

‘Take a look at these. Each of our models has a complete
portfolio, of course, but it’ll be quicker and easier if you look through the
albums and choose three or four to narrow it down.
Now, Katy, Eloise and Anne are already booked, Marcie
wouldn’t be
able to work tomorrow because she has to take her daughter to the dentist and
Linda,’ she turned to the appropriate
pages
and pointed, ‘has got tonsillitis, but all the others are
available, so just take your time and see who you
think would
be most suitable. I can phone them as soon as you decide,
and confirm the booking straight away.’

‘
Our food’s arriving. I’ll
have a look at them afterwards,’ said Matt gravely, having made up his own mind
at least an
hour ago, but realizing
that Camilla might need a little more
time
in which to get used to him. ‘That lobster looks amazing.
Do you know, I asked the hotel receptionist to
recommend a
good restaurant. When we
first walked in here I thought of
clubbing
her to death with my nine iron, but it’s thanks to her
that I’m sitting
here now with this lobster, and with you. I may recommend that she should get a
raise instead.’

‘
Ask the waiter if he
knows her,’ said Camilla, spearing a
plump Mediterrancean prawn with her
fork and rolling it slowly
through the
creamy, garlicky mayonnaise with which it was
served. ‘He’ll probably
tell you that he’s her boyfriend’s sister’s cousin’s son.’

Matt watched her while she ate,
scarcely able to concentrate
at all upon his own meal. By asking her questions about the
agency he was able to sit and listen to her, and to
realize with
pleasure and relief that his
first instincts had been correct: she
was perfect.

The quality she possessed, and which he found so entirely
irresistible, he decided, was that of innocence. She was simply
unaware that she was a beautiful, sexually very
attractive woman.
She had absolutely
no idea.

And that was so rare these days. Matt
had glanced briefly at
the
photographs in the album, pretending interest while all his
thoughts had been absorbed in listening to her
low-pitched,
slightly hesitant voice, and while he recognized that maybe
the
models were a fraction more physically
perfect . . . more
classically beautiful . . . he had known that Camilla
was the one
he wanted. These beautiful
women, apart from the fact that
they earned their living by their looks,
were conscious of their beauty anyway. Some, he had discovered over the years,
were
aware of it only most of the time;
others, constantly. Each
movement,
each gesture was geared to that fact, each thought
and word dictated by
it.

Camilla, on the other hand, with her
shy, self-deprecating
sense of
humour and that guileless smile, coupled with her aura
of beauty, had hit him like a bolt out of the blue. She was
unique, as far as he was concerned, and he wanted
her more
than he had ever wanted
anything else throughout the course of
his entire charmed life.

The sudden appalling thought that she
might not want him
in
return sent an icy shiver of panic down Matt’s spine, made him realize that he
could not afford to waste another second.
He had to be reassured that Camilla at
least
liked
him. That
would be
enough to keep him going throughout the rest of the meal. . .

‘The girls in that album,’ he said abruptly, nodding his
dark head towards it as if it were a coiled snake, ‘I don’t want any of them.
None.’

‘
I’m sorry?’ said
Camilla, dismayed. What was going on? He had been silent, listening with
apparent absorption while
she told him about Zoë and her daughters, and
now he was cancelling the assignment? ‘But you didn’t even
see
all of
them.
Have another look . . .’ Embarrassed,
as appalled as if he had said, ‘Your baby is ugly’, she pushed the album back
towards
him, almost toppling over his wine glass as she flipped open the
cover.

. . . see, that’s Daisy, one of our
most popular girls, she’s
just
completed a photographic assignment for
Vogue,
she’s done TV
commercials, catwalk . .

‘
But I don’t want a
catwalk model,’ he intercepted, moving
the wine glasses out of danger. ‘I
want "a date". It’s practically mandatory, Camilla; all the other
guys will be there with their
wives or
girlfriends – maybe both,’ he added with a wink, ‘and
I couldn’t think
of anyone I wanted to ask. You can’t just pick
anybody, so I decided to go to the professionals and hire
someone
for the day; that way at least I know I won’t have any hassle afterwards. Doesn’t
that make good sense?’

‘It makes sense,’ said Camilla with the slightest touch of
annoyance, ‘but I still don’t understand why none of our models are good enough
for you. Look here, at Miranda . . . she speaks four languages and she’s
beautiful
. .

As her trembling fingers struggled to turn the pages of
the album, Matt’s hand reached out and grabbed them. Camilla had
smooth, elegant hands. She wore no nail polish, and
no rings.
Her face, when he glanced
up, was a picture of irresistible
confusion.

‘
Camilla, I want you.’

‘
Oh,’ she
said finally, gazing past him – just over his left
shoulder with such apparent concentration that Matt was forced to turn
and look round, to see who had caught her
attention. That middle-aged
man eating langoustines with his fingers and letting the juice run down his
chin? The two girls
frantically fending off
a lazy and disinterested wasp? Those
pink and cream roses in their tub?

Camilla, seeing nothing at all, was thinking. She didn’t
even
dare to examine Matt’s reasons for
inviting her, but, since
meeting him she had felt as if she was walking effortlessly
along a narrow beam, convinced that it was less
than a foot
from the ground. It had all been so easy. Now, hearing the
unmistakable meaning in his words, it was as if
she had suddenly
looked down and
found that the beam was in fact a tightrope,
and that it was stretched
across the Grand Canyon.

‘
I’m sorry. I say what’s on my mind, I guess.’

He neither looked nor sounded sorry.
Camilla dredged up
the remains of her
previous confidence. Loulou wouldn’t have been floored in this situation; she
tried to think how her friend would react now.

‘
You . . . want . . .
me,’ she repeated his words slowly, making
them sound like a challenge. ‘Are
you talking about tomorrow’s assignment?’

‘That’ll do for a start,’ he said, the laughter lines
deepening around his eyes as he realized that she was deliberately playing him
at his own game.

‘You want
me
to do it? Be your "date" for
the day? Are you sure?’

‘
Positive.’

‘
OK,’ said
Camilla, amazing herself even as she said it. She had meant to refuse outright.
‘I will. But I’d already made arrangements to spend the day with someone else.
Would it be OK with you if they came along too?’

Matt stared
at her astounded.

‘
Oh, sure,’ he
managed to say eventually. If Camilla was
bringing
her goddam boyfriend he’d shoot himself quietly
afterwards. ‘Whatever
you like, Mrs Stewart. No problem.’

C
hapter 30

It wasn’t the British Open, but it was just as popular
with the crowds, who loved the easy, carnival atmosphere of Pro-Am
tournaments and who had flocked in their thousands
to see
their favourite actors, singers
and comedians playing to the
gallery,
competing with the professionals and thoroughly
enjoying themselves.

Caroline, sprawled across the bed in
Janet Reger charcoal
grey silk knickers and nothing else, watched the TV coverage of the
tournament and admired the neatness of it all. The stars
of stage and screen were enhancing their image, the pro
golfers
got free publicity, the crowds had a
great day out and the
benefiting charities made oodles of money from the
event. Everybody won, nobody lost. If only life were that easy, she
thought, reaching for the remote control and
turning up the
sound. There was her mother’s favourite singer,
partnering Greg
Norman and exchanging banter
with those watching him.
Ballesteros,
on an adjoining green, was arguing comically with
his caddy while two of the British Ryder Cup team
built
sandcastles in the bunker.
There, wearing a false nose and
shocking pink plus-fours, was the New
York comedian whose name Caroline could never remember, playing against his
fellow
American, Matt Lewis. When she had
been over in the States
she had been persuaded by a golf-mad girlfriend
to go along to
the US Open Championship.
Together they had followed Lewis’s
progress through an entire round
because Donna was convinced
that he had
winked at her before teeing off at the start. Tall,
broad and deeply tanned, he was a big man, yet
effortlessly
graceful. Caroline
watched idly as the TV camera panned in for
a close-up. He had his arm
casually around the waist of a blond
woman of
about thirty, attractive but not as flashy as most of the players’ girlfriends.
The woman smiled as he inclined his
dark head and whispered something
into her ear, then applauded enthusiastically as the comedian putted into the
hole for a birdie. Matt covered first his own eyes, then hers, in mock despair.
The
crowd, easily amused, fell about
laughing at the expression on
his face, then applauded once more as a
small, dark-haired boy ran over to the hole, retrieved the ball and solemnly
presented it to Matt.

The scene switched to the fourteenth
green and Caroline,
losing
interest, turned off the TV and lay on her stomach with
her chin resting on the cupped palms of her hands.

Staring at the blank screen, she
realized that witnessing
people being happy together had a tendency now to make her
feel faintly nauseous. It was a new
symptom which, coupled
with the
cold, inner well of loneliness and the sensation that she was somehow enclosed
within a clear, plastic bubble, soundproofed and separated from events going on
around her, only seemed to confirm what she already knew.

Her spontaneous marriage was failing
as rapidly as it had
come about.
What had seemed like a smart move at the time —practically a fairy-tale come
true — was in fact not smart at all.

She really
had made a truly horrible mistake.

And it wasn’t only sad, it was ridiculous, she reflected
with impatience. Who, after all, would believe that she could possibly
be unhappy, being married to a stunningly
good-looking,
sexually perfect man who as an added bonus was not only a rock
star but a rock star with more money than she could ever seriously imagine?

She had even received
hate-mail,
for
Christ’s sake, from
teenage girls
distraught by the news that their beloved Nico had
taken a wife. How had she dared to
do
it to them? . . . She
didn’t
deserve
someone like him . . . they’d
never forgive her
for doing this to them . . .

Caroline closed her eyes, willing the loneliness to go
away. She
should
be happy to be one of the most envied females in
Britain, but they simply didn’t know what it was
really like to
be married to someone who was kind, generous, funny, not
to mention great in bed . . . and to feel that they, too, were sealed
inside a plastic bubble just as silent and
impenetrable as her
own.

At first it had all been so thrilling. Maintaining the
pretence
that she had no idea who he really
was had been a doddle.
Listening to Nico’s reluctant explanations – as
if he’d been half
afraid that they might put
her off! – she had feigned astonish
ment,
disbelief and finally serious acceptance of the situation.
She had
assured him that it wouldn’t alter her feelings towards
him, that she loved him for himself rather than for who he was
in the eyes of the public, and that she was
glad
she hadn’t
known about it beforehand because then he might have
worried needlessly that her motives were less than genuine.