Mistresses: Blackmailed With Diamonds / Shackled with Rubies. Robyn Donald

The screen was always full of nubile girls wriggling around half dressed.

      I changed all that. Out went the girls. In came animal programmes, stuff about vets, nature expeditions, deep-sea diving. I bought up the rights to old animal series that hadn’t been seen for years, and the public loved it. Advertisers fought to give me their business.

      Suddenly I was the wonder man whose finger on the public’s pulse was never wrong, the visionary who could see past cheap smut to an audience starved of beauty, the marketing genius who could make wildlife profitable.

      Actually, I just enjoyed animal programmes.

      It was like having a pact with the devil, only this devil was called Grandpa Nick. Wherever he was, he knew the terrible things money and success had done to me. I was out of my mind with boredom, and I swear sometimes I could hear the old man cackling.

      There was nothing for me to do. Any fool can make money if they start out with a pile that someone else worked for.

      Where were the great challenges in life?

      At the moment my biggest challenge was fending off Grace’s attempts to match me with Selina Janson. I usually ended up doing what Grace wanted because I felt so guilty at the way my life had been lived at the expense of hers.

      It shouldn’t have happened that way. She’s only ten years older than me, and she could easily have married, especially after I struck out for myself.

      When you fly the nest that’s supposed to be it, right? You don’t reckon on the nest flying after you.

      But Grace nobly declared that nothing would make her abandon me, and I couldn’t hurt her by saying how much I longed to be abandoned.

      So here I was, mid-thirties and still officially sharing a home with my sister. I have my bachelor pad in town, and I’m there most nights, but Grace pretends it’s just the odd occasion.

      Maybe that was why she’d redoubled her efforts to marry me off to Selina.

      ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against that lovely girl,’ she complained to me a few weeks earlier.

      ‘I’ve got nothing against her,’ I protested. ‘I’ve never had anything against any of the girls you’ve tried to handcuff me to. But if I married every girl I’ve got nothing against, my wives would fill a city and there’d be some sort of scandal.’

      ‘I do wish you’d be serious,’ she fumed. ‘It’s no way to approach life.’

      ‘It’s a great way to approach not being married off against my will.’

      ‘You’ve got to marry some time.’

      ‘Why? For all you know I might be gay.’

      ‘Don’t give me that nonsense,’ she snorted. ‘Not after that girl who—’

      ‘Yes, never mind,’ I said hastily.

      ‘You need a suitable partner in life, and you should be looking carefully.’

      ‘Why? I’ve got you looking carefully for me,’ I said, as lightly as I could.

      As I knew she would, she missed the irony.

      ‘Yes, I am, and it takes a lot of trouble to weed out the unsuitable ones.’

      ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t weed them out,’ I said meekly. ‘It would probably do me a lot of good to meet someone unsuitable, as an awful warning. It might really teach me a lesson.’

      ‘Oh, stop playing the fool. I know all about the sort of semi-clad females who float through your apartment—’

      How did she know? She never saw them. I’d made sure of that. But Grace had her spies and they could teach MI5 a thing or two.

      I couldn’t resist teasing her.

      ‘They’re not all semi-clad. Some of them wear nothing at—’

      ‘That’s enough. We’re talking about your future wife.’

      ‘I was trying not to talk about her. Why Selina?’

      ‘Because she has the very best connections. Her mother’s related to a title, her father’s one of the richest merchant bankers in town—’

      ‘And you think I’m so hard up that I need to marry money. Thanks!’

      ‘Money should marry money. It doesn’t pay to spread it around too thin.’

      ‘Gracie, darling—’

      ‘And don’t call me, Gracie. It’s vulgar.’

      ‘We are vulgar. You talk as though we were heirs to an ancestral fortune, but Grandpa Nick made just enough to get by. Dad worked himself into the grave to make more than he needed, and, heaven help me, I’m going the same way. I’ll swear I’m getting grey hairs.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘Here at the side. Can you see?’

      ‘No, I can’t,’ she said, giving me the fond smile that reminded me that I did actually like her a lot. ‘You’re too handsome for your own good, and you know it.’

      ‘I’m still going grey from the treadmill I’m on. If I knew a way to jump off it I would, but I won’t manage that by marrying Selina Janson.’

      ‘I didn’t mean to make too much of her money,’ Grace said in a relenting tone. ‘It’s simply that she has all the right qualities.’

      With difficulty I refrained from tearing my hair.

      ‘No, Grace, she has only one of the right qualities, and that’s the fact that I have nothing against her. It needs a lot more than that.’

      She eyed me suspiciously.

      ‘You haven’t become entangled with some floozie, have you?’

      ‘Why floozie?’ I growled. ‘I might have met a nice girl.’

      ‘Then I’d know about her. Who is she?’

      I was about to say that she didn’t exist when some instinct for self-preservation stopped me.

      ‘I don’t think I ought to tell you any more just now,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘I don’t want you investigating her to find out if she’s “suitable”.’

      ‘Meaning that she isn’t?’

      ‘She’s suitable for me,’ I said.

      I accompanied the words with a smile which was meant to be knowing, but I had a horrible feeling I just looked foolish. I don’t think Grace noticed. She was seething at my mad dash for independence.

      ‘Surely you can tell me something about her?’ she demanded. ‘What does she look like?’

      ‘She’s beautiful.’

      ‘What else?’

      ‘She has a perfect figure and she’s very sexy,’ I improvised wildly.

      ‘Where did you meet her?’

      ‘Around.’

      ‘Really, this is very unsatisfactory.’

      ‘Not to me,’ I said.

      ‘Well, I’ve made arrangements for the summer now, and it’s too late to change them.’

      The hairs began to stand up on the back of my neck. ‘What arrangements?’

      ‘Oh, don’t pretend not to know. We talked about chartering a yacht and you agreed.’

      ‘You vaguely mentioned a yacht,’ I said, frantically searching my memory, ‘but I don’t think we actually agreed—’

      ‘I said we should charter a yacht to cruise the Mediterranean and you said, ‘Sure.’ Which is what