Never to Love (4 page)

“Andrea, will you marry me?” he asked softly.

CHAPTER TWO

Andrea stared at him incredulously.

“You seem surprised,” he said after a moment.

“I ... I had no idea
...”
She made a bewildered gesture, still too stunned by his astonishing suggestion to think clearly.

“So you thought my intentions were dishonorable.”

She flushed and looked down at her hands.

“I wasn’t sure that you had any intentions,” she said in a low voice.

“Do you mean you regarded me as a friend?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Then you deceived yourself, my dear. There is no such thing as friendship between a man and a woman, particularly when the woman is as beautiful as you are,” he said crisply.

There was an uncomfortable pause while she
m
ade an effort to collect herself.

“But
...
why me?” she asked at last, when it was clear that he expected her to make the next move.

“A number of reasons. The principal one being you have most of the qualities I want in my wife.”

She looked up at him. “But you’re not in love with me.”

“Do you believe in love, Andrea?” His eyes were unreadable.

She weighed the question carefully, wondering how he expected her to answer.

“No, I don’t,” she said quietly.

“Then we understand each other.”

He sat down again, crossing his long legs, completely at ease.

“Tell me, have you thought about getting married?” he asked.

“Yes, naturally. I don’t expect to go on working forever.”

“So, since you don’t believe in what people call falling in love, I take it you will marry for security.”

“Yes. And children. I would like to have some children.”

“Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“No, I was an only child.”

“When you think of security do you visualize a semidetached house in Wimbledon, with a husband who spends his Saturday afternoons mowing the lawn?”

At that, a glimmer of amusement lighted her green eyes.

“Not exactly,” she replied.

“Come here.”

After a momentary hesitation she went over and stood beside his chair.

“Give me your hand.”

She held out her hand and he clasped it lightly at the wrist, rubbing his thumb against the pale smooth skin and studying her polished nails.

“You wouldn’t have time to paint your fingernails if you had shirts to wash and floors to scrub,” he said softly.

“Perhaps not. But I do a certain amount of housework now, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt your domestic capabilities,” he said casually. “I daresay you would run the villa in Wimbledon very well if you had to. But I think this house would be a more appropriate setting for you
.”

She disengaged her hand and began to walk around the room, wishing she could be by herself for a while to review his fantastic offer in a calmer frame of mind.

It was an ironic situation. The only motive for his interest that she had ever considered was that he wanted to make her his mistress. It had never occurred to her that he was thinking of marriage. Years ago, when she was still in her early teens, she had made up her mind that she would marry for money, and yet now when the richest man she was ever likely to meet was offering her everything she had ever wanted, something made her hesitate.

“You know so little about me, Justin,” she said suddenly, turning to face him from across the room.

“Isn’t there a saying that one never knows people until one lives with them? I know all that I want to. You’re beautiful and intelligent and you have a rare ability to sit still and not chatter incessantly about trivialities,” he answered.

“I have a very bad temper,” she said.

“Then we will be well matched, for so have I.”

She could not imagine him in a rage, shouting and storming and banging doors like most irascible men. Somehow the whiplash of sarcasm seemed more in character, or the cold, silent displeasu
r
e that was often more terrifying than an outburst of wrath.

“Suppose
...
suppose there was something disreputable about me?” she said slowly.

“Is there?” He looked amused.

“I don’t belong to your world, Justin. Everything I have I had to fight for. Even Jill doesn’t know the truth about me.”

“What is the truth?” he said quietly.

She made a restless movement, wondering how she could begin to make him understand.

“I told you that I was brought up in Liverpool and started work at fifteen,
”
she began slowly. “I suppose you thought my parents were hard up, but it was more than that. My father died when I was seven. He was a hopeless drunkard. My mother’s people didn’t approve of her marriage and wouldn’t help her, so she had to work in a factory, leaving me in the care of the neighbors. We lived in a basement in a street called Briggs Lane. It was a slum. There was a gas meter just behind us and everything smelled of gas, even the food. The women went about in carpet slippers with metal bobby pins in their hair and most of the children had skin diseases and nits. Do you know anyone who has nits, Justin? Well, that’s the sort of background I come from. My mother died just after I started work and I lived in a working girls’ hostel. It seemed like paradise after the basement.”

All the time she was talking she had not looked at him, guessing the distaste that must show on his face. To someone like Justin, who had never known what it was to be poor, the recital must have sounded doubly squalid.

“Is that all?”

“Yes, that’s all,” she said tersely. “The rest you know.”

She heard him move and a moment later he was beside her, turning her around to face him.

I “I asked you to marry me,” he said gravely. “Where you were born or how you lived as a child has nothing to do with it.”

“You don’t have to be chivalrous,” she said bitterly
.

“When you know me better you will find that chivalry is not one of my virtues.”

“Supposing I accepted. What would your family and your friends think?”

“What other people think has never particularly concerned me.”

“It’s easy to say that now, but you might regret it later.”

“My dear child, the principal advantage of having a considerable amount of money is that it enables one to do exactly as one pleases, regardless of other people’s reactions. Besides, there is nothing particularly disgraceful about what you just told me. Poverty is a common misfortune.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s getting late. I think we’ll postpone our tour of the house till another night. I’ll take you home.”

He went across to the fireside and pulled the bell. While they waited for Hubbard to answer it, he said, “I’ll give you three days to think this over, Andrea. If you make up your mind before then, you can telephone me. If not we’ll have dinner on Friday.”

They did not talk on the way to the apartment, but outside her door he took her hands in his and said, “Take your time over it, my dear, and remember that you have just as much to offer me as I have you. As it happens, I decided t
o
ask you to marry me some time ago, but I waited till tonight for you to get to know me better. We have a lot in common, and I think we could deal well together.”

When he had gone she climbed the stairs to the apartment feeling curiously exhausted, as if she had been through some physical ordeal. Jill was still out with Nick, and she made herself a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen, table thinking over all that Justin had said.

Once, when she was about ten years old, she had woken up in the night and heard her mother crying. Andrea had never forgotten the sound of those dreadful racking sobs, and it was then, at an age when most children are scarcely aware of sorrow and hardship, that she made up her mind that one day she would escape from Briggs Lane and everything that it represented.

When her mother had died there had been no one to whom she could pour out her misery, and later people often got the impression that she was callous because she never showed her emotions. They did not guess that she was often desperately lonely and forlorn.

By the time she was sixteen she was fiercely determined to achieve all the things she had never had, but it was not until three years later that she thought of fashion modeling as the key to her ambitions. She arrived in London with just enough money to pay for a training course and cheap lodgings, and at first the other students, who were mostly girls from comfortable middle-class homes, had raised their eyebrows at her shabby clothes and apparent lack of the attributes that would make a successful model. But the director of the model school, an astute, and experienced woman named Mary Lyall, had recognized that Andrea had something that prettier girls lacked. When she started her training, Andrea was a girl that most people would have overlooked. By the end of it she had developed that rare and indefinable star quality that prompted Mrs. Lyall, who also ran a model agency, to help her through the first few weeks before bookings began to come in in increasing numbers.

Andrea took her success calmly, saving most of her earnings and continuing to concentrate on her work as hard as she had at the beginning. She knew that, like film starlets, models often had a meteoric rise to fame and an equally sudden descent into obscurity. She knew, too, that however successful she might be, there were hundreds of other girls fighting for a front place and that her own popularity would not last forever. It was then that she thought about marriage as a means of obtaining permanent security in her new life. Her mother’s life had been ruined by a foolish infatuation for a weak, shiftless man,
and she had seen many attractive, happy girls turned into embittered wives through living with relatives or in drab furnished apartments. Regarding love as an emotional delusion that soon wore off under the exigencies of day-to-day living, she had decided to marry for money.

So far, two men had wanted to marry her. One of them was a young accountant whose income was probably less than her own and whose prospects were uncertain. The other was a textile manufacturer, a widower with a son only a few years younger than Andrea. She guessed that his feeling for her was a middle-aged infatuation, and although she considered his proposal very seriously for some time, in the end she refused it, although she knew that wealthy men were seldom young or even passably good-looking, and that this deficiency was part of the price she would have to pay. That a man as rich or as presentable as Justin Templar should want to marry her had never occurred to her, and now, although it was the realization of all her aims, she was suddenly full of doubts and uncertainty.

What had he said
?
“
Remember that you have just as much to offer as I have.”

Frowning slightly, she opened her purse and studied her reflection in the mirror of her compact. Did he really think that her face and figure were an adequate exchange for his name and all that went with it?

Thrusting the compact back in her purse, she lighted a cigarette and tried to analyze the situation from his point of view. He had said that he shared her views on the subject of what people called love, so what would influence his choice of a wife? Not social position, for Jill had said that he had been the target of matchmaking mothers for years without result. Evidently he wanted a wife who would be a showpiece like his house in Syon Place or his gleaming Bentley or the bloodstock horse he had ridden over the moor in Cornwall.

The best that money can buy,
Andrea thought wryly.
Apparently I am it. Well, he's old enough to know his own mind, I suppose.

She finished her cigarette and washed up the tea things and went to bed.

The next day
she avoided the espresso coffeehouse where she usually lunched with a group of other models, and went instead to a quieter restaurant where the customers were mostly suburban housewives up for a day’s shopping and she was not likely to meet anyone she knew. Justin had given her three days to make her decision, and the time seemed to be passing very swiftly. Toying with her apple tart, she wondered what it would be like to be married to him.

Suppose that after they were married he revealed traits that she had not seen before?

Once before she had gambled her future, but this time the stakes were terrifyingly high, and if she lost she would have to pay for her misjudgment for the rest of her life. On the other hand, if Justin proved to be a difficult husband, she would have the compensation of li
v
ing in luxurious surroundings with no more anxiety for the future. There was even the possibility that they might be happy together.

All that day and the next day she was torn with indecision, and it was not until late that night that she made up her mind.

As she dialed Justin’s telephone number her hands were trembling and she felt very cold. Hubbard answered the telephone. She recognized his soft, rather quavery voice.

“Is Mr. Templar in, please? This is Miss Fleming speaking.”

“Will you hold the line, madam?”

It seemed an eternity before she heard the click of the extension receiver being lifted. Then Justin’s voice said, “Andrea?”

Her mouth was dry and there was a lump in her throat. She tried to speak but no words came.

“Andrea? Are you there?”

“Yes
.
.. Justin...
”

“What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

She took a grip on herself.

“No, nothing’s the matter. I’m quite all right.”

“You sounded so odd.”

“Justin, I’ve made up my mind. If you’re sure you want me, I will marry you.”

It came out in a rush, and the minute she had said it she felt a queer upsurge of relief, as if the tension within her had suddenly snapped.

There was a short pause and then he said quietly, “I’m very glad. Thank you.”

“I hope I haven’t interrupted you, but you asked me to let you know.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh.

“No, you didn’t interrupt me. I was reading. Can I come around to see you?”

At that nervousness quickened again.

“I was just going to bed,” she said hastily.

“Oh, I see. Then we’ll lunch together tomorrow. Where can I collect you?”

“I’m not sure where I’ll be. It would be better if I met you.”

“As you wish, Can you manage one o’clock at the Savoy?”

“Yes. That’ll be fine.”

“Right. If you’re free in the afternoon, we’ll look at some rings.”

“Oh ... yes.”

“Good night, my dear. Thank you for letting me know.”

“Good night.”

A moment after she had replaced the receiver she heard Jill’s key in the latch. Before she could switch on the light, Jill was in the room with Nick just behind her.

“Hello. Why the gloom?”

“I was dozing. Good movie?”

“Not bad. I had some horrible child behind me who kept kicking the back of my seat. When Nick asked him to stop, his mother got frightfully worked up and complained in a loud voice about people who were always finding fault with innocent little darlings.”

Jill turned to Nick. “Are you hungry, darling? Shall I make some scrambled eggs?
”

It was not until they were having supper that Andrea broke the news.

“I’m going to marry Justin,” she said suddenly.

There was a startled silence while they digested this information, and then Jill jumped up and hugged her.

“Andrea! How exciting! Why on earth didn’t you tell us before? When did it happen? No wonder you were mooning around in the dark. I had no idea you were really keen on him. Tell us about it.”

“There’s not much to tell. He asked me and I accepted,” she said quietly, looking at Nick, who had not yet spoken.

For the fraction of a second she saw that there was a peculiar expression in his gray eyes, but he concealed it almost immediately and said warmly, “Delighted to hear it, Andrea. I’ve never met Templar, but Jill says he’s a very good fellow. When’s the great day?”

“I don’t
know yet. We haven’t had time t
o
discuss our plans.”

“But when did he propose?” Jill asked, looking slightly puzzled. “I thought you hadn’t seen him since Monday.”

It occurred to Andrea that the truth might sound odd, so she told a white lie, and said Justin had left just before they came in.