Sue for Mercy - Veronica Heley Page 0,17

diabetic for years but never managed to come to terms with it. He knows perfectly well that if he doesn’t take his injections on time, or if he forgets to eat, he’ll be ill. But he had nothing to live for. He quarrelled with everyone; with his son, his friends... he couldn’t keep a personal assistant longer than a month, and his servants only stay because of the fabulous salaries he pays them.”

I had never seen him so moved before. He stalked around the room, his eyes flickering this way and that, his right hand chaffing that ill-treated left hand. I felt he was on the verge of telling me something important. I kept very quiet until he went on.

“We’ve always seen a lot of the Brenners. David is J.B.’s godson. He’s always wanted me to work for him. Ever since I was a child...”

He stopped abruptly, looking down at his scarred left hand. His face went blank, indicating that he was about to have a headache. I reached for the aspirins, and risked a prompt.

“Then he asked you to work for him? You were sorry for him. That’s why you left your job in London to work for him?”

“No,” he said slowly, still looking at his hand. “I could lie to you and say that that was the way it was, but it wasn’t so. He didn’t ask me to work for him this time. I went to him for a job. I said I wanted to study his methods so that I could learn how to make money quickly. I told him I needed a lot of money in a hurry. That was true, too, in a way. And that’s as much of the truth as I can tell you, Sue.”

He took the aspirins and went to lie down. He didn’t refer to the subject again.

*

Bessie was horrified on Monday, when I told her I’d left the Mini with Charles for the day. She was sure he’d disappear with the car, and that I’d never see it or him again. I defended him, saying he was going to pick me up at half past five from work. She waited with me in the hall, and tried not to crow as the minutes ticked by. Charles was five minutes late — I was to learn that he was always five minutes late for everything. Just as Bessie was urging me to phone the police, he swept in through the front door and claimed me. Wearing dark-rimmed glasses and in a huge sheepskin-lined leather coat, he looked extremely presentable. I could see Bessie revise her opinion of him as I introduced them to each other. She even winked at me as he took my shopping basket and urged me to the door with one arm round my shoulder. His attitude was quite clear; I was his girl for the week, and I wasn’t to waste time on anybody else while he was around.

I wish he could have told me I was beautiful, and ultra desirable, and all that rot, but it never seemed to occur to him to flatter me. He told me I should wear my hair loose always, that it was amazing the amount of muck some girls put on their faces, and that I wasn’t to think of plucking my eyebrows. That was all the comment I got on my appearance. When I told him I feared I ought to diet, he didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at. He said, shortly, that he liked something to get his hands around, and sparrow-boned females usually had sparrow-boned brains. He very nearly spanked me when I wailed that I hadn’t any clothes good enough to be seen out in. He said that if my lack of good clothes bothered me that much, he’d get his mother to select something for me and he’d pay the bill. He added that he personally couldn’t stand women who wore skirts so short that they showed everything they had, and necklines so low that nothing was left to the imagination. From which I gathered that he was extremely conservative as far as a woman’s appearance was concerned.

He still had the occasional nightmare, but nowhere near as badly as on that first night. I would half wake him when he started to moan and shiver in his sleep, and turn him till his head rested on me, when he would quieten down and sleep through till morning. He told me he’d