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Fiercely she swallowed back her threatening tears and picked up the phone to ring her mother, leaving a message on the answering machine when there was no response.
Normally, she would have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to relax at one of Sally’s barbecues and would have gone early to help her friend with the preparations, but now, thanks to Kyle, even that small pleasure was denied her. There was no aspect of her life that he hadn’t somehow managed to invade, damage even, it seemed, to the extent of turning Sally, her oldest and closest friend, against her. Well, he hadn’t vanquished her yet. She had promised him war, and war was exactly what he was going to get, Star decided, gritting her teeth. Beginning with her campaign...
So Kyle thought her work was sexist, did he? Well, perhaps she could find another way of getting her point across—something he would find easier to relate to...something he would find easier to understand.
Her mind buzzing, fuelled by adrenalin and the challenge of getting the better of him, Star started to work.
Three hours later, her arm stiff from the speed with which she had been working, she finally sat back and studied what she had done, her mouth quirking in a surprisingly youthful and wicked grin.
The first drawing was very similar to the first part of the story-board she had submitted for approval—a factory setting with the workers wilting listlessly in the heat. He was followed by a second drawing showing the same workers looking refreshed and working energetically after the installation of Brad’s firm’s air-conditioning system. Both scenes were being observed by a Playboy-type model.
However, the next pair of drawings bore no resemblance to those she had submitted for the campaign and were strictly for private viewing, Star acknowledged as she surveyed them in triumph; the first of the pair featured the same Playboy-type female, partnered in bed by a man whose features were a caricature of Kyle’s—and even caricatured he managed to look unexpectedly attractive, Star noted with a frown as she wondered why her attempts to make his chin look weaker and his eyes less magnetic had not worked. He was lying on his back on the rumpled bed, his glance piously averted from his flaccid penis, whilst his partner told him happily that she knew exactly how to put things right.
The next drawing showed the pair of them in an extremely compromising position in the now deserted factory. The newly installed air-conditioning unit was blasting out cold air, but instead of smiling in triumph Kyle’s pneumatic lady-friend was eyeing his still unresponsive body dolefully, whilst underneath Star had pencilled in the caption, There are some overheated situations which even we cannot cool down.
What she had done was, Star knew, totally outrageous and would, of course, have to be destroyed. But, even so, it had been worth her aching wrist and the three hours that she had spent working on it just for the satisfaction the result had given her.
Ridiculing Kyle had helped her to get back her sense of perspective.
She still didn’t agree with his criticisms of her campaign, but at least now she felt able to reflect on them in a more detached manner, her mind already examining various ways in which she could tone down the elements of the campaign that he had objected to whilst still keeping its essence. She was still convinced that the campaign would work, that its tongue in cheek humour would appeal to potential customers.
It was gone six o’clock. She hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast and she had virtually no food in the flat either. Fortunately, the local supermarket didn’t close until eight.
An hour later, as she drove home, her shopping complete, her mood was still triumphantly buoyant. Perhaps she could attend Sally’s barbecue after all, she decided—if only to prove to Kyle that she wasn’t going to let him come between her and her friend.
She had just parked her car outside the block of flats and retrieved her shopping from the boot when she was hailed by one of her neighbours.
Amy Stevens was a widow in her early sixties, a small, vague sort of woman who always set Star’s teeth slightly on edge, although she berated herself for being so unresponsive to the other woman’s obvious attempts to be friendly, telling herself that it wasn’t Amy’s fault that she came across as being so irritatingly helpless and dependent and that she ought to be more sympathetic towards her loneliness.
‘I’ve just been talking to your new neighbour,’ she told Star now. ‘Such a charming man. So polite and well mannered. He’s an American.’
An American!
Star listened in foreboding as she looked from Amy’s face to the blank window of the second-floor flat next to her own.
‘He said he’d be staying for several months,’ Amy confided, and then added, ‘I told him how concerned I was about the fact that just about anyone can drive through the gates into our grounds and he agreed with me that we really ought to have proper security gates fitted.’
Star sighed. The installation of electronic security gates was one of Amy’s hobby-horses. Her box of groceries was beginning to make her arms ache, so she used them as an excuse to escape.
She had almost reached the top of the stairs when she heard a door opening onto the landing, followed by the sound of decisive male footsteps crossing the marble floor.
She reached the top of the steps just as he started to descend them and for once she was grateful for Amy’s need to chatter as she and Kyle came face to face.
His surprised, ‘Star, what are you doing here?’ as he automatically reached forward and took hold of her grocery box before she could protest caused her to bare her teeth.
She returned, ‘I live here, as if you didn’t know...’
‘No, actually I didn’t,’ he told her curtly, frowning. ‘If I had... Which is your flat?’ he asked her, glancing round the small hallway with its four doors.
“This one,’ Star told him grimly, indicating the door closest to his own.
She already had her key in her hand and as she stepped past him and unlocked her door she held out her arms for her groceries, but to her anger he ignored her, simply stepping past her and into her flat, announcing, ‘I’ll take these through into the kitchen for you.’
‘No, thanks...’ Star began, but he was already moving down the narrow hallway, leaving her with no option other than to follow him. She saw him pause as he passed the open door to her sitting room, openly appraising his surroundings.
Star had redecorated the whole flat the year before, choosing colours and fabrics which she felt most at home with—crisp, natural, crunchy linens, smooth, sensuous silks, clean cottons and soft wools, all in harmonising shades of cream and beige, her favourite colours.
Even Lindsay had been surprised the first time Star had allowed her to see all over the flat, marvelling slightly enviously at Star’s gift for blending colours and fabrics.
‘It’s perfect!’ she had exclaimed. ‘But it just seems so...so unlike you...’
‘What did you expect?’ Star had asked her wryly as she’d watched Lindsay smoothing down the padded toile cover on her bed. ‘A screaming mixture of clashing, angry colours?’
‘No, of course not,’ Lindsay had denied, but as her friend had studied the small pattern on the cream wallpaper that picked out the soft, muted dark red of the toile bedcover Star had seen that she was completely thrown by Star’s choice of decor and Star hadn’t felt it necessary to admit to her that her home, these colours, this soothing blend of fabrics and shades were, in fact, a reflection of that part of herself that she preferred to keep most private—that part of herself that was vulnerable and in need sometimes of the calm, soothing comfort of surroundings that provided her with the harmony and almost physical sensual comfort that she had missed as a child.
Sometimes, just to touch her fabrics, to feel their differing strengths and textures beneath her fingertips, to know that they all sprang from natural sources, was enough to soothe even her most turbulent thoughts and memories.
Normally, when she was expecting clients, she closed all the doors to her private rooms, and on their arrival ushered them str
aight into her work room, and now, as she watched Kyle studying her home, her defences immediately sprang into action so that when he turned to her and asked her quietly, ‘Did you choose all this yourself?’ she immediately lied.
‘No... I have a friend...a client who’s an interior designer. She did it.’
Why, when his immediate acceptance of her lie was exactly what she wanted, did she feel such an acute stab of unexpected chagrin at that acceptance?
‘You can give those to me now,’ she told him curtly, but she had forgotten that the door to her work room was open and that by moving she was almost deliberately inviting Kyle to look towards it and see the drawings that she had left on display.
She tried to close the door, but it was too late. He had already seen what she had done and was moving closer to inspect it more thoroughly.
Star held her breath as she watched him slowly examining all four drawings.
‘You’ve got a good eye for caricature,’ was all he said when he had finished. ‘But not, it seems, for proportion.’
