Past Loving. PENNY JORDAN

mean what he was saying by the intensity and immediacy of her raw disbelief that he could actually be doing this, that he could actually be telling her that he was leaving for Harvard at the end of the month and that their relationship was over.

      ‘Marriage? But you’re only eighteen. You’re going to university in September. You’re too young…’

      You’re too young. How neatly and logically he had used her youth against her, exonerating himself from all blame…from any guilt.

      Where now she might have bitterly pointed out that she had also been too young for the sophisticated game of casual sex he had obviously been playing with her, then she had been too shocked, too hurt…too overwhelmed to remind him of those words of love he had whispered to her when he had held her in his arms, to remind him of the passionate intensity of their lovemaking…to remind him that at eighteen she had been too young and too unknowing to be able to differentiate between a man’s desire for sex and a girl’s infatuated desire for what she perceived to be love.

      Now, with over a decade of experience separating her from the girl she had been then and the woman she was now, she waited patiently with a calmly serene face for Patsy to unload her burden of news, allowing only the merest flicker of response to cross her face when Patsy told her importantly, ‘Robert Graham is back. I thought I’d better warn you…’

      ‘Warn me?’ Holly enquired politely, allowing her voice to express a faint puzzlement with her friend’s intensity. ‘Warn me about what?’

      ‘Well…well, about the fact that he’s back,’ Patsy told her, floundering a little. ‘I mean, I can remember how devastated you were when he dropped you—well, we all can. I was saying to Lucy only the other day that we all thought that you and Robert would be married by the time you were twenty-one…’

      Grimly suppressing her real feelings, Holly allowed herself to appear relaxed and to smile. The media-familiarisation course her PR adviser had virtually forced her to go on was having some benefits after all, she decided with irony.

      ‘Good heavens, Patsy, that was over ten years ago. You don’t surely still think that silly teenage crush on Robert Graham has any bearing on my life today, do you? Heavens, I can barely even remember what the man looks like. He must be well into his thirties by now.’

      She managed to make it sound as though Robert were merely one step away from drawing his pension, her smile and shrug implying that the woman she was today could only derive amusement and disdain at the thought of her childish folly in loving such a man.

      Patsy’s mouth dropped open a little.

      ‘You mean you aren’t bothered?’

      ‘About what?’ Holly enquired, smoothing a non-existent crease from her suit. The combination of primrose yellow silk and her highlighted blonde hair was one which she privately considered to be gilding the lily, but her PR consultant had been insistent that for the sake of the business she must present an image with which other women could not only identify, but which they could also aspire to.

      ‘But it’s not the real me,’ she had protested, wrinkling her nose with distaste.

      ‘It will be,’ Elaine Harrison had told her robustly with a determined look. ‘It will be.’And rather weakly she had given in, more because she felt that she owed it to everyone else, those who had supported her and the business in the early days when she was struggling to make ends meet, than because it was what she personally wanted.

      ‘We aren’t changing you,’ Elaine had pointed out more kindly. ‘Just emphasising certain aspects of you.’

      No, they hadn’t changed her. But sometimes she wished…

      ‘About Robert moving back here,’ Patsy was saying. ‘I mean I thought he’d left for good. From what I’ve read in the papers he’s so high-powered and everything now that I never thought he’d want to come back here to live. Every time you read about him, he seems to be jetting off to a different part of the world to see one of his clients. A management consultant…you’d think he’d live in New York or London.’

      Her voice expressed her dissatisfaction that someone who could choose to live somewhere so glamorous would bury themselves in a quiet English village. Personally Holly couldn’t think of anything worse than living in a large impersonal city…but then she was not Patsy. She wasn’t Robert Graham either, and although she wasn’t going to say as much she too was surprised that he should base himself here in the country.

      Patsy was wrong about one thing, though…Far from jetting all over the world to see his clients, his eminence and reputation these days was such that they were the ones jetting in to see him—and he was no longer someone employed by millionaires. He was one himself.

      Not that she envied him that. Large wealth brought with it its own set of very complex responsibilities, as she was beginning to discover.

      ‘So you’re not bothered about it, then?’

      Patsy sounded quite disappointed. For the first time a glimmer of amusement broke through the icy apprehension which had frozen the normally warm core of her life since she had learned that Robert was coming back. No wonder she had turned to her garden for solace, desperately planning colour schemes for the spring, desperately giving herself something to hold on to, something to reach out for, something to look forward to once the long cold months of winter were over.

      ‘I’m bothered about all manner of things,’ she corrected Patsy with a faint smile. ‘I’m bothered about the ecology, about the destruction of the rain forests, about the destruction we, the human race, are wreaking not just against one another but against our whole environment—’

      ‘Oh, yes…I know about that,’ Patsy interrupted pettishly. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant and you know it. I meant were you bothered about Robert coming back?’

      Holly stood up. As she reached for her bag, the soft swing of her hair skilfully hid her face.

      ‘No, I’m not. Why should I be?’ she questioned, adding wryly, ‘As I’ve just said, all manner of things do “bother me”, as you put it, Patsy…things which are far, far more important to me than Robert Graham could ever be.’

      She smiled at her friend as she straightened up and added dulcetly, ‘And as for Gerald, I really don’t think you need to worry. Have you actually met his new secretary yet?’

      ‘No. No, I haven’t, why?’

      ‘She’s fifty-five, married with two grown-up children and four grandchildren,’ Holly told her drily.

      OUTSIDE SHE STOOD in the sun for a while, enjoying its beneficent September warmth. Last night there had been a full moon, and the night air had been cool, a foretaste of the autumn to come. She thought about her wardrobe, bulging with the new autumn clothes the PR girl had almost forcibly made her buy. They were launching their new range of natural perfumes and body products before Christmas; there would be a rash of media interviews to attend. She had to look the part…and there were now so many things to consider. She herself had insisted that she would only wear clothes made in natural fibres, and then had been irritated when Elaine had solemnly pronounced, ‘Very good—yes, that will really underline your commitment to the environment and to the new green mood sweeping the country.’

      She had wanted to protest there and then that her decision had nothing to do with fitting into a given mould, but Elaine had already passed on to other issues, complimenting her on her decision not to have her hair permed but to keep it natural and straight.

      She had ached to point out that the shockingly expensive hairdresser who cut it once monthly and the even more horrendously expensive lightening procedure which involved a trip to London every month could hardly be described as natural, but what was the point? In actual fact she rather liked the simple elegance of her new hairstyle now that she had had time to grow accustomed to it. It was much more suitable for a woman of thirty than her previous unstyled long hair had been, but she hated the way she sometimes felt that she was being forced into a specific image, just