Folly's Child (6 page)

‘What do I think? Well, she's dead of course. She'd never do that to us …' She broke off. ‘ No, to be truthful, that's what I told him, but deep down I don't know. I honestly don't know.' She gulped her drink.

‘Does it matter?' he asked.

She shook herself free of his arm.

‘Well of course it bloody well matters!'

‘Why? You've lived the last twenty years without her, whatever.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘Do you really want to know the truth? It might be a pretty upsetting business.'

‘I'm upset already,' she admitted. ‘In any case – I'm going to have to face it sooner or later. That O'Neill man isn't going to let up now he's got his teeth into it. He's going to dig and dig. God what a job! Imagine doing a shitty job like that!'

‘Not unlike a journalist really,' Nick observed drily. ‘ Well, Harri, you can either sit back and let him do the digging or you can do a little investigation yourself.'

‘I don't know. I don't know whether I want to.'

‘I was rather hoping you'd do a nice follow-up photo session for me', he said slyly.

‘On what?'

‘That's up to you. But you didn't cover Kuwait in this lot, did you? Or the sweatshops of Korea, or the rip-off merchants in Hong Kong? A trip East may be just what you need.

‘Yes.' But she sounded less than convinced.

They sat in silence for a while, then he looked meaningfully at the whisky bottle.

‘Shall I have another drink? Or am I going to be driving?'

She laughed shortly but it came out as a half-sob.

‘Oh Nick, what would I do without you?'

‘That is the first time I've heard you admit it,' he said ruefully. ‘You generally seem to manage by yourself very well.'

She did not answer.

‘Well?' he pressed her. ‘Do I have that other drink or not?'

She reached for the bottle and half filled his tumbler.

‘Have the bloody drink, Nick. And please … I would like you to stay.'

At first she slept, heavy, exhausted, whisky-induced sleep. Then suddenly she was wide awake, nerves jangling again, thoughts chaotic.

She eased herself out of Nick's embrace and he did not stir. How she hated sleeping in his arms! Making love was all very well, pleasant and soporific if not exactly ecstatic, but afterwards … she needed her space.

I'm a bitch, she thought sometimes. I use Nick shamelessly and I don't like myself for it. But he's got no one to blame but himself. He allows me to do it. If I were a man I'd tell me to get lost – and fast!

Tonight, however, she had no room for such introspection. There were other things on her mind.

She eased herself out from under the duvet, reaching for her heavy wool man's dressing gown and tying it firmly around her, crossed to the window. It had stopped snowing now and the sky was clear and black with a few stars. Beneath her window she could see the white humps of the pot in her backyard – pots that in summer she filled with geraniums and petunias in an effort to bring some colour to the uniform greyness, beyond them the wall that bordered the yard was also white-crusted. A familiar scene, yet one that had changed subtly since yesterday – just as everything else had been changed by that newspaper item, the whole of her life being undermined making her feel that nothing was quite as it had seemed.

In one way, of course, Nick had been quite right when he had said that whatever the truth it made no difference. There was no going back now, no way to rewrite the years as she had known them. And they had been good years. With a child's resilience she had quickly adjusted to the loss of her mother, who had never been more than a glamorous appendage on the periphery of her world, and Sally had stepped in to fill the breach more than adequately.

Now, looking back with the wisdom of adulthood, she could appreciate what she had taken for granted at the time. The moment the news had broken Sally had been there, comforting her, buffering her, cuddling her when she cried. There was a warmth about Sally that superceded all her amusing little vanities and softened the acid remarks she was prone to making – which were in reality a defence mechanism. Sally had a great capacity for love and a down-to-earth quality that Harriet presumed was a throw-back to her early upbringing and which had been honed and tested in the fire when she had given birth to – and kept – an illegitimate son in the days when illegitimacy was still a scandal. To Harriet Sally had become a surrogate mother and after she had married Hugo that position had been strengthened so that Harriet had felt secure and loved, never questioning her importance to the people who were important to her. Although the glamorous world of fashion and wealth spread wide around her, Harriet's own family circle was tight – her father, Sally, and Sally's illegitimate son, Mark Bristow.

Mark had been educated in England and later decided to live there, and it had been because of him that Harriet had first decided to come to London, though nowadays she saw little of him. He was in advertising; he and his partner, Toby Rogers, had their own agency, and paradoxically Mark had spent most of the last year back in the States. He was there now, setting up some important job or other. Had he not been she might have telephoned him instead of Nick, when she had been desperate for company. But then again, she might not. In a way Mark was too close to home, too much a part of the world whose foundations had just been rocked, yet somehow on the outside. No matter what the truth might turn out to be it would not affect Mark. The foundations upon which his life were built were intact. Winds of change might blow around him but his basics were not under threat.

Beneath the duvet Nick stirred, flinging his arms across the empty space where Harriet should have been. She stood stock still, hoping he would drift off to sleep once more without realising she was not there. But after a moment he turned over again, mumbling thickly: ‘Harri? Where are you?'

‘I'm here,' she hissed. ‘ Go back to sleep.'

‘What are you doing out of bed? You'll catch your death.'

‘No I won't.' His concern irritated her. Wasn't that what she had wanted, though? Someone to be here, to care about her? So why now did the very fact that he was awake and talking to her seem like an invasion of her privacy?

‘Come back to bed, love.'

‘I'm all right.'

‘No, you're bloody not!' He got out of bed, exclaiming as the cold air enveloped his warm sleepy frame. ‘Christ, this place is like an icebox! Hasn't your heater come on?'

‘I don't have one in the bedroom, Nick. It's healthier not to.'

‘Healthier! To catch bloody pneumonia!' He caught her, steering her back to the bed, bundling her in, dressing gown and all. She allowed him to do it though her irritation mounted. She couldn't ask him to stay then yell at him for caring for her. She lay stiffly as he huddled close, sharing the warmth.

‘I was thinking,' she said into his shoulder.

‘Not now,' he protested. ‘ There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow.'

‘No, there won't,' she said. ‘I've made up my mind, Nick. I have to try and learn the truth. If Mom is still alive I have to find her. If she's not, well …'

He did not answer.

‘I'm going home,' she said. ‘ On the first available flight. I'm sorry.'

‘Don't be sorry. I suppose you'll do what you have to do.'

‘Yes.'

‘Only one thing – be sure you take your camera with you.'

She laughed softly. ‘Oh Nick, always first and foremost the editor!'

‘Always that.' There was regret in his sleepy voice.

She was growing warmer now and drowsier. With the decision made she felt a kind of temporary peace.

‘All right, Nick,' she murmured. ‘I'll take my camera with me.'

‘Promise?'

‘I promise.'

She had no way of knowing that he was thinking not so much of the next photo story she would submit to him as the necessary therapy it might provide. A journey into the past, with skeletons rattling in cupboards at every dark turning, was almost bound to be upsetting. Nick, with his unfailing journalist's instinct, felt in his bones that this one would be more traumatic than most.

In his office high up in the twenty-five storey building that is 550 Fashion Avenue, mecca of the New York fashion industry, Hugo Varna sat at his desk and fiddled with the executive toy Sally had bought for him last Christinas. It was a stupid thing, he thought, three gold baubles on springs that set up a continual motion, banging one against the other, and he kept it on his desk only to please her. But today with his mind too preoccupied to work he seemed quite unable to keep his hands off it. It clicked irritatingly and Hugo pushed it aside, swivelling his chair around to face the window and the panoramic view of Manhattan.

Hugo Varna's showrooms occupied an entire floor of the 550 building and from the moment a potential client stepped out of the brass elevator she was treated to an ambience of unashamed luxury. The vast foyer was carpeted in the softest green imaginable, the walls were even paler, so that at first glance they might have been taken for white, and the Venetian blinds were a perfectly blended shade of moss. The minimum of furniture emphasised the impressive size of the foyer – only small modern tables bearing huge smoked glass ash trays, two or three low chairs and a huge arrangement of dried ferns and foliage in shades of brown and gold graced the enormous expanse. From cunningly concealed speakers piped music wafted, but music played so softly that it was almost inaudible to the human ear, a faint teasing melody that soothed the soul and created a restful atmosphere almost without one being aware of it.

This soft green womb formed an oasis of peace in the chaotic tumble that was Fashion Avenue. Outside in the street the traffic might roar, here there was hush broken only by that soft subliminal music, outside the air might be heavy with the mingled smells of petrol fumes and donuts, Macdonalds' burgers, trash cans, and sweat, here there was just the faintest perfume of a pine pot-pourri, subtle as the music.

Even the bustling atmosphere of the 550 building itself seemed not to have invaded the Hugo Varna floor. Here the sales staff glided about with languid grace more reminiscent of Paris than New York, the house models managed to look like elegant advertisements for Varna even after a long session of standing stock still while a toile was pinned and draped and adjusted around them, and even when a rail of sample clothes had to be wheeled across the hallowed expanse of green, carefully hidden inside grey and black sample bags to make sure they were safe from the photographic eye of a fashion spy, it was managed with what Hugo referred to as ‘panache'

‘The simplest of jobs can be done with panache', he would instruct whenever one of his staff fell short of his standards of perfection – the standards that endeared him to his ‘Shiny Set' customers and staff alike.

Hugo himself was lithe, elegant and charming with a slight edge of fascinating middle-European foreignness that came from his Bulgarian father. But it was his own formidable talent that set him apart.

Mostly nowadays Hugo took for granted all the assets that talent had brought him. Twenty years at the pinnacle of his profession had paid him handsomely and he accepted the accolades and the financial rewards as no more than his due. But on occasions he stopped in his tracks to wonder just what he was doing here, amidst all this elegance and opulence, numbering the rich and famous and powerful amongst his clients – and his friends.

Not bad for the son of a penniless illegal immigrant, he thought then, not bad for a boy raised on the wrong side of town.

‘Where exactly do you hail from, Hugo?' Margie Llewellyn, the chat-show queen, had asked him once when she had interviewed him, and he had mesmerised her millions of viewers with the story he had told. His father, a seaman, had jumped ship to seek a better life when Bulgaria had been on the brink of civil war in the 1920s. He had taken the name of Varna from the name of the port from which he had sailed but he had lived his life in terror of deportation, a fear that had haunted him long after it had ceased to be a real threat, so that he had never been able to enjoy his son's success, seeing it only as something which drew unwelcome attention to the Varna family.

Hugo had been perfectly happy to talk at length on the Margie Llewellyn Show about the days when he had played on the streets of the Bronx, and how in this unlikely setting a talent for sketching had developed into an interest in designing clothes. Apart from his father, Hugo's family had consisted entirely of women – his mother, his three sisters, his maternal grandmother and various assorted aunts and cousins all of whom (his mother excepted) had striven to dress with what Hugo would later call ‘panache' on a pittance. He had taken far more interest in their efforts than his father had thought was right and proper for a boy and when Leonie, his eldest sister, had been apprenticed to a dressmaker his fascination had grown. From sketching the outfits she made to inventing designs of his own was but a short step and by the time he left High School he knew exactly what he wanted to do. His sisters, all working by this time, supported him through a course at the New York Fashion Institute of Technology. They were inordinately proud of him, if slightly puzzled by their unusually talented brother.

When he graduated Hugo took a succession of low-paid jobs in 7th Avenue and the optimism with which he had set out began to be dimmed by the sheer sick-making banality of what he had to do – cutting samples in the disgusting fabrics with which the greedy cutthroat manufacturers he worked for made their living. But all the while he was learning and soon the time had come when he was no longer satisfied to design for others. He began cutting his own samples on his mother's kitchen table and getting them made up by his sister and her friends at the dressmaker's where she worked.