Trust Too Much. Jayne Bauling
how is our innocent victim, as Loren keeps insisting you are? I believe she thinks she invented the phrase all by herself.’
‘If you’re so scathing about people’s intellectual limitations behind their backs—and to their faces, now I think of it, because she said you’d called her an airhead—why do you go out with such bimbos?’ Fee flared, incensed on Loren’s behalf.
Simon wore his most arrogant expression. ‘Because they don’t try so hard to be clever, whereas half-bright women keep trying to be cleverer than they are and it bores me because I see through them.’
‘God, have you any idea how inhibited your intolerance must make people when you can’t even be bothered to hide it? I’ll be frightened to open my mouth now,’ Fee claimed tempestuously.
‘You don’t count,’ Simon said rudely, with an indifferent glance at her mouth before noticing the newspaper she had discarded and observing at which page it was open. ‘Looking for…what did you tell me? A home, a car and a job? In fact, we may be able to help you with the first. Rhodes Properties are mainly commercial and industrial, but we have recently added a division dealing with residential, and it’s turning out to be a paying concern with land here so scarce, and rents for ground-floor apartments as high as you choose to make them when everyone is so nervous of a cut in electricity putting lifts out of order…But haven’t you considered staying here? The house still belongs to your father, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ Fee glanced up at the green-tiled roof, a sort fairly common in Hong Kong. ‘But it’s everyone’s home really, for all of us to come back to. If you must know, I want to get away from Babs and Charles because if I’m not independent they’re likely to go on treating me like a baby forever.’
And because she wasn’t a natural fighter, she was afraid she might be tempted to settle for the easy option and let them, Fee supplemented silently, but she wasn’t about to confide that much to Simon. For some reason it was important that he shouldn’t guess how much of the old, uncertain Fee still existed.
He was sending a lazily amused smile across the space between them.
‘They must be blind. It’s definitely a very adult Fee who has come home to us.’ Pausing, he observed her complicated reaction to the meaningful tone before digressing, ‘Your father is still mountaineering, isn’t he?’
‘In a sense. I think he’s part of a movement to clear old base-camp sites of litter all over Pakistan and Nepal, now that the problem has been realised, so he’s giving something back, which is nice. Mountains are all he has ever cared about; all the pleasure he has had has come from them,’ Fee acknowledged the kind of single-minded selfishness that had long since ceased to perturb her.
‘Lucky he had the means to indulge himself.’ Simon referred to the private fortune Jim Garland had spent in pursuit of his obsession.
‘He usually remembered to keep us supplied with money to live on, and he did buy this house,’ Fee reminded him loyally.
‘And dumped you in it when you were a baby. Wasn’t there some near-scandal about that?’ Simon frowned.
She laughed. ‘After my mother died when I was two. She’d never properly recovered from some complication at my birth because it happened somewhere remote in the Himalayas, with no doctors for hundreds of miles. The nannies he left me with here kept walking out, and someone found out and threatened to take him to court if I wasn’t looked after better, so he married Angela. She had Babs, and nowhere to live and no money—poor Babs doesn’t even know who her father was—so it worked out quite well when he was home, only Angela likes lots of attention and a man to be around all the time, and he kept telling her horror stories about my mother’s trials to discourage her because he didn’t want her with him in the mountains.’
Simon shook his head. ‘You girls must have had an even more chaotic childhood than I did. My various step-parents and unofficial aunts and uncles kept changing, but they were there. Angela wasn’t often, was she?’
Fee shook her head.
‘She’s an incurable romantic, always out looking. But Babs looked after me, and when we were older we looked after each other. I shiver when I think about it sometimes, though,’ she added in a hushed voice. ‘Once I got pneumonia and Babs couldn’t make the doctor’s receptionist understand her, and another time it was cold and she decided we should have a hot meal. She was only ten and she burnt her hand badly, and I was frantic; I didn’t know what to do…’
‘God, it’s a horror story.’ Simon sounded unusually thoughtful and he studied her expression for a moment. ‘People shouldn’t get married. Jim and Angela have never bothered with a divorce, have they? Angela was home last year, but then she met someone on his way to take up a contract job somewhere—Jakarta, I think—and she took off with him. But you’re a big girl now and don’t need anyone to take care of you, as you’ve just demonstrated by walking out on your lover in Australia and not even bothering to be discreet about it, all in the fine tradition of your odd family.’
Fee didn’t think she had taken care of herself at all successfully, considering the humiliation she had suffered as a consequence of her own stupid naïveté, and, while she loved her family, she had no intention of following in any of their footsteps. Her dreams were conventional, of a husband who came home to her and children she would care for herself.
‘You would believe that was the way it was,’ she taunted sharply. ‘It may interest you to know that absolutely no one else does.’
‘As we’ve agreed, that’s because the fools all still see you as the child they remember. But you and I both know you’re not. You grew up in a sexually sophisticated milieu and it was only a matter of time before you adopted our mores. Welcome to the real, adult world, darling. It’s a pleasure to know you—or it will be.’
Fee just managed not to look startled. For a moment it had almost sounded as if he was flirting with her, the way he did with other women, but surely that was impossible? Not Simon. Not with her!
‘You’re wrong! About the Australian business, I mean.’ Her dark blue eyes flashed as she dismissed the ridiculous idea. ‘But I don’t care what you think.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ he commended her insouciantly. ‘Never explain yourself, never make excuses, never mind what people say and think. Incidentally, Charles was telling me on the phone earlier that you weren’t finding the job market too promising. That’s why I’m here. I might just have something for you if the position of assistant to Sheldon’s assistant entailed what I imagine it did. There’s a woman who’s leaving Rhodes whose position you might be able to fill, although why she has to take off so inconveniently is beyond me. Her excuse is so stupidly irrational that I refuse to dignify it by calling it a reason.’
Fee’s anger subsided and she looked at him hopefully, aware that Rhodes Properties’ reputation was excellent, but then rare pride stirred.
‘I don’t need you and Charles to arrange my life for me, thank you very much, Simon,’ she asserted caustically. ‘I’m quite capable of finding a job for myself, and, considering how scathing you’ve been about other people’s failure to realise that I’m not a helpless baby any more, I’d have expected you to tell him to go to hell when he asked you.’
The smile Simon gave her was biting. ‘Oh, definitely not a helpless baby. A spitting cat is more like it, and I do mean the wild kind. Charles didn’t exactly ask me—’
‘No, but I bet he hinted like mad and you felt obliged to come up with something because he’s a friend and you men have this stupid buddy-code about helping each other out,’ she accused tempestuously. ‘I don’t mind Charles interfering so much, because he’s family, but I don’t really even know you except as his friend, so don’t try to make a charity of me. I won’t accept it.’
Simon was still smiling at her, derisively now, but something flickering at the back of his eyes seemed to suggest that she had either angered or offended him.
‘No,