Советский спорт 37м. Редакция газеты Советский спорт

      ‘No, it’s not, not any more.’ Martha jumped up suddenly and strode over to the window. ‘I made a fool of myself; I guess we all do that sometimes but I’m much wiser now.’

      ‘And you just can’t forget him, can you?’ Jane said softly. ‘Is that why there’s been no one else?’

      Martha was silent for a long moment, then she said wearily, ‘Jane, wouldn’t you hate to think of yourself reduced to that by a man who was no more in love with you than——? I can’t even think of a comparison. So yes,’ she said shortly, ‘there are some things that are hard to forget.’

      ‘But you didn’t give him much of a chance to fall in love with you by the sound of it, Martha,’ Jane objected.

      ‘I wanted him to, though. I can’t tell you how much... Oh, what the hell?’ She turned back from the window defiantly. ‘The thing was, despite all those wild hopes and dreams, do you know why I kept up that appalling act? Because I knew deep down I was so way out of his league that he would never do more than amuse himself with me.’

      ‘But why?’ Jane asked intensely. ‘You’re beautiful, you’ve got spirit, you’re intelligent, you——’

      Martha held up a hand. ‘All that’s——’

      ‘True!’ Jane insisted.

      ‘Pretty girls are a dime a dozen,’ Martha said scornfully. ‘If I fell by the wayside no one would even notice. The thing is, in those days I was raw,’ she said baldly. ‘Oh, I don’t mean I was uncultured or uneducated but I was certainly unsophisticated,’ she added impatiently. ‘I had lived all my life on a farm not quite beyond the black stump but not far from it and I only knew about sheep and horses and motorbikes—don’t you see?’

      ‘Yes, I do,’ Jane replied. ‘Not that I agree with raw, except perhaps in your heart.’ She stopped and waited.

      Martha paced around a bit then tossed her long fair hair back with something like a shiver.

      . ‘Displaced, dispossessed, dumped in a big city with no qualifications—of course you were raw,’ Jane said quietly. ‘With pain and anger, with a huge chip on your shoulder against life and all those who lived it with wealth and ease and assurance—and hungry for love. You were also nineteen,’ she added prosaically as Martha cast her a look that told her clearly she was verging on the dramatic, then grinned. ‘Don’t forget your hormones, ducky. Every magazine you ever read tells you they can make a girl’s life hell!’

      Martha stared down at her, then her beautiful mouth curved into a reluctant smile and she plonked down on the other end of the settee. ‘Promise me something—don’t let’s lose touch——Oh, no,’ she said helplessly as more tears fell but Jane started to laugh through them and protest that this was the final shower...

      

      It was an eight-hour flight to Singapore, then nearly twelve to London, which gave Martha a lot of time to think, and she sighed several times and wished rather devoutly that she hadn’t unburdened herself so to Jane because it had brought it all back and made her wonder how long it would take to forget Simon Macquarie.

      I suppose I should take my own words of wisdom to heart, she thought with irony once, and remind myself that if it hadn’t been for him I mightn’t be where I am today. She laid her head back in the dim cabin as the 747 flew through the night and most people slept around her, and acknowledged that as a direct result of that stormy encounter she’d made a pledge to herself that one day she would be the kind of girl a man like Simon Macquarie could fall in love with. Assured, sophisticated, worldly and certainly not a hot-tempered, rash spitfire who had to wear abbreviated clothes to make a living.

      Yet it had been clothes that had got her started towards her goals. Not that she’d even considered modelling clothes as her chosen career; it had chosen her one day out of the blue when at yet another wearying cocktail party a young man with a ponytail and two cameras slung round his neck had touched her on the shoulder and told her in broken English that he could make her into the next Elle MacPherson.

      He hadn’t, of course. But she’d slowly worked her way into both photographic and catwalk modelling with André Yacob’s help, not only photographically but because he’d been able to impart to her some of his almost uncanny love and understanding of fabrics and clothes—and in the process enhanced both their financial positions quite considerably. Which had given her the leeway to go about sophisticating herself, as she thought of it, and to help her parents after the awful tragedy of losing their farm, until they both died within months of each other. That was when she’d decided to fulfil her longheld dream of travelling abroad, and although André had nearly burst into tears and had begged her to stay he’d finally succumbed to her determination and come good in a surprising way. Since she’d had a pair of English-born grandparents and was able to get a work permit, he’d said she might as well keep her hand in at the same time and had written to a friend of his mother’s in London—a dress designer, Madame Minter—introducing Martha. Consequently, Martha had an appointment to see Madame Minter the day after she arrived. Although not well-known in Australia, Martha had heard the name and heard it spoken with some reverence.

      But if it comes to nothing I’ll just start my holiday, Martha thought for the umpteenth time somewhere over India; now why don’t you go to sleep?

      But even when she did fall asleep she dreamt about Simon Macquarie watching her with that dispassionate, lazy amusement he was so good at, or occasionally with something darker in his eyes and mood that she detected but couldn’t understand—as she systematically pulled up beds and beds of daisies...

      

      ‘Well?’

      ‘Dear, oh, dear!’

      Martha took a deep breath in the rather barn-like studio above an exclusive Chelsea shopfront that featured only one exquisite black silk dress in the window behind the gold scroll on the glass that said simply ‘Yvette Minter’, and thought, This is all I need! Because, on top of jet-lag, her luggage had been lost, she’d had to cope with her first dizzying experience of London, buy herself some clothes and now, only twenty-four hours after landing, was confronted with this angular, autocratic French woman who’d looked her up and down and, in only slightly less fractured English than André’s, commanded her to strut her stuff in a strapless gold evening gown with a huge, billowing, unmanageable skirt. And now she was shaking her head sorrowfully.

      Martha’s chin came up. ‘Look, I know I might not be looking my best, Madame Minter, but I can’t be that bad,’ she said drily.

      Madame Minter pulled a scrap of lace from her pocket and applied it to her eyes, still shaking her head sorrowfully.

      ‘OK!’ Martha tossed her head. ‘Say no more, love!’ And she reached behind her to unhook the dress.

      ‘Stop, you foolish child,’ Madame Minter commanded, and put the hanky away. ‘I only express thees emotion because I wonder where you ’ave been all my life—ah, the ‘auteur, the wonderful disdain. I ’ave not seen the like of it for years!’

      Martha’s mouth fell open.

      Madame Minter continued, though, ‘And just a leetle touch of vulnerability now and then! Plus the athleticism, the legs, the river of gold ’air, the eyes like deep pansies, the delicate bone-structure so sometimes you will look like a great lady, sometimes like a tomboy. Ah, when I ‘ave finished weeth you, Miss Martha, London will never know what ’as heet eet. And we’ll sell an awful lot of my clothes, you and I,’ she added in brisk, perfectly unaccented English.

      ‘I...I’m...’

      Yvette Minter smiled. ‘I cultivate my French accent for clients, you know. And sometimes under strong emotion it cultivates me. But tell me, why has André been keeping you to himself all this time?’

      ‘I...Do you mind if I sit down?’ Martha said. ‘When I’ve taken the dress off, of course. One thing: I refuse to pout, I always have, but it upsets