Sins

Impatiently Emerald called Robert over to say goodbye to him, stepping back from him as he made to run into her arms.

‘No, Robert, don’t touch me, your hands are filthy. And besides, you are far too old now for that kind of thing.’

Ignoring the grim look Drogo was giving her, she turned on her heel. Really, her mother was so stupid. Did she honestly think that Emerald would allow anyone, man or woman, to control her or damage her in any way? She loved her freedom and her social status far too much for that. Hadn’t she always promised herself that nothing could ever be more important to her than being who the world–her world–believed her to be?

She would never let anyone prejudice her status, especially not a mere man. She would never allow her reputation to be ruined for the sake of a sexual fling, as her mother had risked doing. But then she was far, far cleverer than her mother.

‘Move up,’ Janey demanded cheerfully as she sat down next to Rose on the sofa in the sitting room of the Cheyne Walk house, where Amber was having a family get-together prior to returning to Cheshire.

‘No Emerald, I see,’ Janey commented, reaching for a chocolate digestive, ‘although Mama is taking Robert back to Chesire with her in the morning. But she did look wonderful in those photographs in Vogue.’

Rose agreed.

‘Cindy says that she should have worn one of my designs, though,’ Janey complained.

After four years of working for other designers, Janey had finally fulfilled her dream of opening her own shop, Janey F, the previous autumn, using Denby silk in new modern designs to create her pretty little mini-dresses and other clothes, which had immediately proved popular.

Cindy Freeman, a girl Janey had met through her theatrical connections, had recently become Janey’s official business partner, taking over the financial running of the shop, leaving Janey free to design its stock.

Janey, with her eager-to-please nature, had been allowing her hard-up friends to borrow clothes from the shop because, as she had näively told Rose in the weeks after she had first opened, ‘They go everywhere and, like they say, people are bound to ask where they got their stuff from, and then come in to the shop to buy.

‘Cathy McGowan off Ready, Steady, Go! has already asked one of the girls where she got the skirt she was wearing when she spotted her dancing on the show,’ Janey had told Rose excitedly.

Sadly, though, it had turned out that Janey’s friends had not always remembered to return their borrowed clothes, and Rose had been relieved when Janey had announced that she was taking on a business partner who would take a harder-headed attitude towards the running of the shop, leaving Janey free to design.

‘Honestly, Rose, Cindy is just wonderful the way she gets things done and won’t take no for an answer.

‘Oh, and did I tell you that when Charlie and I were having dinner at the tratt the other evening Ossie Clark was there and he came over to congratulate me and tell me that he liked my work?’

Janey’s face was pink with pleasure. Rose wasn’t surprised. Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell were one of the London scene’s most prominent designer couples.

‘Cindy has really turned things round for me. She’s just the best partner I could have had. I am soooo grateful to Charlie for introducing us,’ Janey enthused.

Charlie was Janey’s latest lame duck. An out-of-work model-cum-would-be rock singer, who never seemed to get a job, he was stunningly good-looking and four years younger than Janey.

‘Poor Charlie,’ Janey continued. ‘He’s feeling really low at the moment because he hasn’t got an advertising casting he went for. It’s like he says, it’s so often those who know the right person who get the best work, not the ones with the most talent. He was so sure he was going to get the ad that he’d been out and bought himself some new clothes, and now he’s broke.’

And expecting you to fund him, Rose thought, but she knew better than to say anything.

‘He really needs a holiday to cheer him up, but we’re so busy at the shop that I just can’t take any time off at the moment.’

Rose knew all about being too busy to take any time off. Her own business had really blossomed with the advent of the swinging sixties, coupled with a chance meeting with one of the movers and shakers responsible for some of the new groups emerging on the music scene. Drew Longton adopted the manner and style of an ex-public school boy but his origins and education were middle class. He excelled at spotting–and using–talent, he specialised in funding start-up businesses–hairdressers, boutiques, clubs, that kind of thing–and Rose had received from him several commissions to decorate initially his offices, and then the shops and salons of several of his clients, and their flats. She also received frequent sexual invitations from him.

Drew was good-looking and a smooth talker, but Rose wasn’t interested. She’d met too many men who wanted to take her to bed for her curiosity value. Besides, Drew already had an official fiancée, a pretty blonde-haired model who looked like Patti Boyd.

‘Cindy thinks I should send some of my stuff over to Ellie in New York and ask her if she can get Vogue there to feature it, but you know what Ellie’s like. She’d think I was being brash and pushy.’

‘She is working in the Features Department, not the Fashion Department,’ Rose felt bound to defend Ella. ‘And I think it’s to her credit that she doesn’t go in for nepotism. You never know, though, Janey, with London being so cool it could be that American Vogue might be tempted to do a feature on a fab new London designer.’

‘If they were going to do an article on a designer from swinging London, they’d be more likely to choose you,’ Janey told her. ‘Cindy keeps going on to me to ask you to redesign the shop for us but we aren’t making enough money yet, and you’ve already helped me out so much, modelling for me.’

Rose had reluctantly given in to Janey’s pleas to model some of her clothes in the catwalk show Janey had held at the shop when she had first opened. But it hadn’t been an experience Rose had enjoyed–unlike the twins, who had revelled in the experience. They were both abroad now, training to be fabric designers with Angelli’s in Venice–reputedly the most prestigious silk design and manufacturing business in the world, with offshoots on both the East and West Coasts of North America.

Amber came into the sitting room, looked at her niece and her stepdaughter talking, and wondered ruefully just where the years had gone.

In the morning she and Robbie would be leaving for Denham.

He was such a lovely and loving little boy. She’d done her best to make up for the fact that his mother seemed so emotionally detached from him, apart from those occasions when it suited her to play the doting mother.