She could have accepted his invitation and gone to the Hamptons with him for the weekend, she reminded herself. But then he’d have expected her to sleep with him, and she couldn’t do that.
She closed her eyes. How ironic it was that the cure to her fear of pregnancy–the contraceptive pill–and the madness she believed would follow it, which had prevented her from having sex, had come too late for her. If it had been available earlier, when she had been younger, then everything would have been all right. She could have gone to bed with Brad. After all, she wanted to. She had been attracted to him from the minute they had been introduced. Handsome, debonair, rich and divorced, intelligent, with a good sense of humour, a highly acclaimed investigative journalist turned author, was it any wonder that she’d fallen for him? He confirmed everything she’d always secretly thought, which was that the men she’d mixed with in London were shallow and dull. None of them had ever made her feel as Brad did. If she had been the kind of person who said and believed such things, she could easily have thought that secretly she’d been waiting for him to come into her life.
She’d been first disbelieving and then thrilled when he had begun his subtle pursuit of her. But hard on the heels of her delight had come the harshness of reality. Brad was a liberal thinker, a man of certain strongly held views, one of which was the right of women to own their own sexuality. He had written some high-profile and acclaimed articles denouncing the kind of women who refused to join the sexual revolution and who clung to the old ethos of exchanging their virginity for a wedding ring. Traitoresses to their own sex, he had labelled them; contemptible and worthless, in the eyes of a truly liberated man.
Ella was still a virgin. Not because she had ever had any intention of using her virginity to blackmail a man into marriage–far from it. She had always sworn that she would never marry. It was her fear of having a child and then suffering the same madness that had destroyed her mother that was responsible for her virgin state.
Now, though, the contraceptive pill, which her New York gynaecologist was already prescribing for her because of the problems she’d been having with her periods, meant that she had no need to fear an unwanted pregnancy.
She could, of course, explain to Brad just why she was still a virgin, but Ella was an eldest child, driven by a need to excel at everything she did and a fear of the humiliation of revealing herself as anything less than perfect. Brad was a sophisticated man in his thirties who would, she was sure, be a superb lover and who would expect the same expertise in any woman he made love to.
How could she reveal herself to him as a gauche, totally inexperienced virgin? She couldn’t! Not when her own carefully cultivated image was one of modern sophistication.
It was too late now to regret all the opportunities she had had, at those endless parties Janey had so often dragged her and Rose to back in London, to become sexually experienced.
She just couldn’t bear the thought of being in bed with Brad and seeing his expression change from desire to cold contempt or, even worse, amusement when he discovered the truth. She had visualised that happening so many times inside her head. The humiliation would be unbearable. She wanted to meet Brad on his own level; to delight and surprise him, to hear him saying how totally swept away he was by her power to arouse him past the limits of his self-control. She wanted so much to please and impress him; to be better than anyone else, to be the best; to hear him say that from now on she was the only woman for him and that no other woman could compare with her. That was what she wanted. Nothing less. And since she could never have that then she must just put him out of her thoughts. If she could have waved a magic wand and transformed herself into the woman she wanted to be, she would have done so. But Ella knew from her childhood that there was no such thing as magic. For a long time after her mother had died she had gone to bed at night wishing that somehow during the night all the frightening things she knew about her mother would be magicked away and that when she woke up in the morning there would be a new Lydia, a Lydia who was normal and not mad. That had never happened. There was no magic.
Brad would soon get bored with pursuing her without the response he wanted. He would soon find someone else.
‘Do you know what I like about you?’ he had said to her shortly after they had first met. ‘I like that you are so together, so smart-assed and clever. I like that you’re a woman and not a silly girl. I can see in those eyes of yours that you know what being a woman is all about.’
She had fixed her gaze on the immaculate collar of his Brooks Brothers shirt and tried to be all the things he had just described whilst knowing that she was, in reality, none of them.
She had lived in New York for long enough now–the best part of a decade–to know that no one stayed in the city in the summer unless they had to, and even those that did hightailed it out the minute Friday afternoon came.
Everyone who worked in Vogue’s offices, or so it seemed, either had a place in the Hamptons, or knew someone who did, and weekends saw those members of the staff who weren’t already working out of the city on an assignment heading for the fashionable summer retreat.
Ella could have gone, even though she hadn’t accepted Brad’s invitation to stay at the beach house he was renting for the summer, so that he could work on his new book. She wasn’t short of invitations from various members of the editorial team but since she’d lied to Brad that she had some research work to do that could only be done in the city, she had had to stay put.
She loved New York but there were still times when she missed her family. Sometimes the two different sides of her head were at war with one another: the sentimental, vulnerable side longing for home and its emotional comfort, the ambitious side knowing that only New York could provide her with the opportunity to prove herself.
She was doing very well professionally. Yes, it was true that as yet she might not be writing for Time magazine, filing the kind of hard-hitting factual gritty exposés of the harsh realities of people’s lives that appealed so much to her instinct to protect the weak and vulnerable. But Brad had complimented her on the style she b
rought to her articles for Vogue, and they’d often talked together about their shared belief in the power of television documentaries, and how much they’d both like to work as investigative journalists on them.
The article on which she was working now–about the connection between art and the rich patrons of artists–should have been demanding more of her attention than it was. On Monday morning she was interviewing a prominent socialite well known for her patronage of the arts, one of several interviews Ella had arranged. A photographer had been booked as well, but her heart had sunk when she’d realised who it was–Oliver Charters.
She’d known that he was here working in New York and contracted to Vogue for twelve months. The Art Department were already raving about the vibrancy and innovativeness of the first fashion shoot he’d done for them, and she’d had to admit that the photographs were good.
He had a way of making the models look sensual–so much so that, to her own irritation, Ella had not been able to look at any of the photographs without imagining that he had had sex with the models before shooting the pictures. They had that look about them somehow, that look of having been satisfied. Unlike her.
She gave a groan and threw down her notebook. She was back to Brad again. She literally ached inside for him and could not sleep at night for wanting him. Perhaps if she told him…But how could she? No one was a virgin at her age. She could visualise the look of horror on his face and the way he would back off from her. It was bad enough being a virgin, without anyone else knowing.
Brad was probably lying beside a pool now, sunbathing, a long cool drink at his side, his tanned torso rippling with male muscle. She could just imagine herself smoothing suntan lotion over his shoulders and then down his chest, over his thighs, strongly and hard, whilst his swimming shorts outlined…Ella gulped in air. It wasn’t just pictures inside her head that her imagination was arousing. But this was neither the time nor the place for thinking the way she was thinking. She directed her thoughts into more practical channels. She and Brad had so much in common, their shared interest in investigative journalism, in particular. She wasn’t a fool. She knew perfectly well that it was lust that was motivating Brad’s pursuit of her; she’d seen that reaction often enough, after all, and it confirmed to her that far more men fell into lust with women first and then fell in love with them second than the other way round.
She could have lived with that had she been able to delight and enchant Brad with her sexual skill. He could fall in love with her later, once he’d realised, as she already did, just how close they were to something approaching soul mates. She’d heard, for instance, that he didn’t want children. She’d read that in an article about him that she’d sourced, guiltily ashamed of the almost obsessive urge she’d felt to possess every smallest bit of information about him that she could.
She knew how passionately he felt about his writing and his mission to root out City Hall corruption and reveal the wrongdoings of ‘big players’ for the benefit of ‘the small guy’–a mission she shared. Like her, he chose the theatre and the arts over nightclub life. He was well travelled and wanted to travel more–she too wanted to roam the globe. He was against the Vietnam War and had spoken out publicly.
Oh, yes, he was perfect. The trouble was that there were other women, women who were far more experienced and knowing than she, who also thought that.
The reality was that for the first time in her life Ella was experiencing what it felt like to fall in love and to feel so passionately about that love that she was prepared to break what she’d previously thought of as unbreachable rules to have it. Only the rules that constrained her were rules she’d made herself, not society’s, and she couldn’t break them without risking destroying the desire that Brad felt for her.
He’d teased her about the ocean not being far away from his rented house and the shore being private enough for skinny-dipping. She’d had a hard time stopping her toes from curling up in her shoes, listening to him saying that. She shared an office with three other assistant editors and they all thought she was crazy for keeping Brad at a distance.
‘It’s that British reserve,’ one of them had said, whilst one of the others had giggled and commented that she hadn’t seen much British reserve in evidence the night she’d taken a visiting London rock group out to dinner.
‘They were all as high as kites and fresher than a locker room full of jocks. They were just so cute and sexy.’