Callie shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, Donald. Spencer Plastics is just going to have to take its chances between the three of us.’
Donald chewed on his bottom lip. ‘My father isn’t going to be very happy about that.’
She only just bit back her bitterness, not giving a damn about Sir Charles’ happiness. ‘Why?’ she queried calmly.
‘He wants to expand Spencer Plastics,’ Donald confided.
‘Yes?’
‘Logan doesn’t.’
‘Oh.’
Donald eyed her curiously. ‘He doesn’t usually stand out against my father, but this time he has. How would you feel about the expansion?’
The need to hit out at Logan was strong, and yet she didn’t know enough about the facts to hit out in this way. ‘I’d need to know more about it before I passed any comment either way,’ she answered evasively.
‘I’m sure my father would be only too happy to explain to you.’
‘Some other time, Donald,’ she dismissed sharply.
‘Maybe after the holidays?’
‘Maybe,’ she agreed noncommittally.
She heaved an inward sigh of relief as they turned into the road she lived in. London was curiously deserted on this overcas
t Christmas Day. It had to be the one day in the year when even England’s capital ground to a halt.
‘Thank you, Donald.’ She hastily opened her door and got out on to the pavement, the bitter-cold wind cutting into her.
He took her small case out of the boot. ‘Like me to come up with you?’
‘No! Er—no, thanks, Donald,’ she erased the sharpness from her voice. ‘Please go back and have your lunch.’
‘I’d rather stay with you.’
She could believe he meant that. Christmas in the Carrington household didn’t look like being much fun. ‘Your aunt is expecting you, Donald,’ she insisted. ‘Call me after the holidays, will you?’
‘I’d like that.’
She nodded dismissively, hurrying up to her flat. It all looked exactly as she had left it—the bright gaiety of the decorations and Christmas tree, her opened presents beneath the latter, the nightgown and négligé Logan had bought her lying mockingly in the box.
The first thing she did was pack up all the presents Logan had given her, including the necklace she had forgotten to return to him earlier. Everything would go back to him, she didn’t want anything he had given her.
She lived the next few days in a haze, going to bed, getting up in the morning, switching on the television and dully watching the antics of celebrities who seemed to be perfectly normal the rest of the year.
She forgot all about eating, so that by the time Christmas was at last over she was pale and listless. She went into Jeff’s studio a lot, the place where she felt closest to him. This studio had always been sacrosanct when Jeff was alive. It was very full at the moment, as he had been preparing for another exhibition, one guaranteed to be even more successful than the last.
Jeff didn’t just make likenesses in clay, he made his subjects come alive; he had a rare sensitivity that incorporated a person’s personality into the sculpture and not just a physical outline.
The one Callie loved the most stood in pride of position beside his work-table, set there to give Jeff encouragement in times of lack of inspiration. And as he had been a true artist, a genius, there were all too many of them.
The subject was a woman, the whole figure no more than two feet long, the form of a sheet draped over the lower half of the body, the waist slender, the breasts full and uptilting, the neck slender, the face so beautiful, so without pain or suffering, that just to look at it made Callie want to cry.
It was her mother who lay there so serene, shown through the eyes of the man who had loved her, who had married her, even though they had both known she was dying. Jeff had been married to her mother, had been her stepfather, and when her mother had finally died six months ago Jeff had seemed to lose the will to live too. Oh, not that Callie thought for one moment he had deliberately killed himself, he just hadn’t wanted to live, wanted only to join her mother.
Her mother had been very like her to look at, but there had been lines of pain in her mother’s face that made her seem older than her years. But Jeff had loved her unfailingly, had never ceased to hope that a cure could be found for her before it was too late, insisting on taking her to specialist after specialist at first, until, like her mother, he had become resigned to her death.