Their purchases were being lovingly wrapped in tissue paper when Magenta emerged from the changing room in her suit and blouse. Andreas pulled a wry face at her transformation from virtual sex kitten to businesswoman as he slipped his credit card back into his wallet.
The clutch-bag was the last purchase to be wrapped, and Magenta spied a trio of minute sapphire stones winking up at her from the flap of soft silvery leather before they too disappeared within folds of rustling tissue paper.
‘Your girlfriend’s a very lucky lady.’ The shop owner was silently admiring the tall man she had been addressing, although it was Magenta that her smile alighted on.
I’m not his girlfriend! she wanted to stress, but that would have made her sound as if she were something altogether more eyebrow-raising, so she just smiled and took the bunch of glossy carrier bags the woman handed her with good grace.
‘I can’t believe you just did that,’ she remarked, flabbergasted, as soon as they were outside, walking away from the shop. ‘You’ve just spent a fortune on something I may only ever wear once.’
His long strides were marking out their purposeful path to the car park. ‘Is that all you have to say?’
‘What do you expect me to say?’ she uttered, still totally dumbfounded. She had to quicken her stride to keep up with him.
‘A simple thank you would suffice.’
Of course. If his motive was merely to see her properly attired for a business dinner then she was behaving crassly and with total ingratitude. She was about to apologise and thank him, as he’d suggested, but the simple words he’d spoken were suddenly echoing back at her from out of the dark recesses of her mind.
A simple thank you would have sufficed.
She stopped at the end of the little row of shops, her hand going automatically to her forehead.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Andreas’s concern broke through the wild confusion of her thoughts.
‘I thought...I just thought you’d said something like that to me before.’ She shook her head as shapes started to form out of the mists of that lost time. ‘It was that statue....’
A little porcelain statue of a mother and her child, a girl of about three or four, who was holding her hand and looking up trustingly at the woman. She’d seen it in a shop window and had wanted it for her mother, to try and cheer her up after another of her endless break-ups. To try and stop her drinking and let her know that she had so much else to live for. To let her know how much her daughter really loved her. Needed her...
‘I went back to the shop and it was gone...’ Her brow furrowed with the aching disappointment that seemed to have gripped her insides. ‘What is it they say? The first time we remember something we actually relive it all over again? And the second time we think of it it’s only a memory?’
‘Discontinued,’ the assistant had told her when she had asked if he had another, and it had felt like the end of the world. She couldn’t believe how badly she had wanted that statue and how the anguish at losing it could have been so bad.
‘You asked me why I was crying...’ She looked up at Andreas. She remembered that when she had told him he had rung around shop after shop, trying to find another. And when he had he’d made an eighty-mile round trip in his father’s van just to pick it up for her. ‘You found one for me.’
She remembered showering him with kisses. Laughing and crying right there in the reception area of the pokey little solicitors’ office where she’d worked. She could see him laughing. Looking amused. And, yes...he had said those words to her then: ‘A simple thank you would have sufficed.’
His arm was around her now, warm and supportive, and without thinking Magenta leaned in to his steadying strength.
His shoulder felt like a rock beneath her trembling cheek, and for a few moments it didn’t matter that they were in a village high street congested with local traffic. That there were Friday afternoon shoppers milling around the place and harassed mothers calling errant youngsters energised by the freedom of their summer holiday.
‘Oh, Andreas! What happened to us?’ she appealed to him.
‘Not here. Not yet.’ Determinedly he took her hand and guided her across the busy street. ‘Perhaps not anywhere.’ His voice had a strange quality to it as they reached the entrance to the car park on the other side of the road. ‘Perhaps it’s best forgotten,’ he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DINNER THAT evening, attended by some of the biggest names in the UK hotel business, was held in the ballroom of an impressive nineteenth-century stately home, somewhere deep in the heart of the Surrey countryside.