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Eleanor shook her head.
‘It’s not in London, it’s in Wiltshire—the Wiltshire-Dorset border to be exact, just outside Avondale.’
‘Wiltshire?’ Charles gave her a startled look. ‘Won’t that be a bit far out? For Marcus, I mean…’
Eleanor shook her head.
‘No. There’s an excellent commuter rail service. People do commute, you know, Charles,’ she added teasingly as she saw his frown. ‘And from further afield than Wiltshire.’
‘Mmm… Look, I must go, and don’t worry too much about Louise. If anything I think you’ve been over-generous, and as for the partnership name…’
‘Was I wrong to insist on keeping it?’ she asked him uncertainly.
‘No,’ he assured her. ‘Louise can’t have things all her own way. And nor can Paul.’
Predictably, Eleanor was the first to arrive at the restaurant Jade had nominated.
The head waiter gave her a bored, slightly irritated look until she mentioned Jade’s name, the deference with which she was then treated causing her to smile slightly to herself.
It was twenty minutes before Jade arrived, ample time for Eleanor to study the other diners, most of them women, all of them formidably fashionable and, to judge from the snatches of conversation she could hear going on around her, most of them connected in one way or another to the same world which Jade inhabited.
Jade arrived five minutes later, pausing briefly as though in acknowledgement of the sharp frisson her presence created among the onlookers.
At just under six feet, she would have drawn attention whatever milieu she inhabited, Eleanor acknowledged, but it was not just her height that drew this crowd’s attention; it was Jade herself, the aura that not merely surrounded her but which she actively projected so that it cocoone
d her like a mini force-field.
She had always had it, right from the first moment Eleanor had known her, and, Eleanor suspected, even before that; initially perhaps as a means of defence, the tall, gawky girl whose height drew comment and sometimes derision from her peers, but who had learned to use her ‘differentness’, to turn it round and glory in it rather than retreating from it, ashamed and afraid of the way it set her apart.
Unlike many of the other women present in the restaurant, she was not wearing some outrageously fashionable and to Eleanor’s eye physically uncomfortable, eye-catching outfit, but a simple pale creamy beige suit with a fluidly tailored skirt and an elegant unstructured jacket, the fabric so fluid and graceful that it seemed to hint with covert sensuality at the curves and hollows of her body rather than outline them with blatant sexuality.
Her hair, her trademark, was as always a wild unfettered tangle of thick curls, a deliberate aberration and deviation from the demands and restrictions of her chosen field, not, as many seemed to think, as an affectation but because, as Eleanor well knew, that hair had the texture and strength of unbreakable wire and could not be styled.
Eleanor watched her as she made her way between the tables, regally deigning to pause to acknowledge the odd favoured courtier.
‘Nell,’ she announced in her deep husky voice as she reached Eleanor. ‘You’re here.’
‘You did say one,’ Eleanor reminded her with a smile and then added, ‘I love your suit.’
‘Armani. I picked it up in Milan after his last show. I’m afraid I can’t return the compliment,’ she added drawlingly, standing back to study Eleanor. ‘How on earth did you manage to find something so disgusting?’
She gave a theatrical shudder while Eleanor watched her wryly.
‘This is a perfectly respectable outfit, Jade,’ she told her firmly, glancing down at the pencil-slim skirt and toning blouse which looked attractive and were just what she needed for work. ‘Not high fashion, perhaps…’
‘Perhaps?’ Jade rolled her eyes. ‘My dear, there is no perhaps about it. Have you ordered yet?’
Eleanor raised her eyebrows. ‘I didn’t dare… I’d probably have chosen something completely un-"in”.’
Jade ignored her small gibe and assured her blandly, ‘Impossible. They don’t serve anything like that here.’
And then she started to laugh and Eleanor joined in, catching her breath as Jade hugged her.
‘Oh, God, Nell, I do miss you,’ Jade told her fiercely. ‘How are you? How’s Marcus? And how are my godsons?’
‘No, you tell me how you are first,’ Eleanor demanded. ‘I know you, J,’ she added, using the college nickname. ‘Something’s bothering you.’
‘Mmm… Clever, aren’t we?’ Jade pulled a face. ‘You’re right, of course. I’ve been offered a new job. Quite a prize plum, really. Editorship of American Fashion; a huge increase in salary; all the perks anyone could want, including the most fabulous Manhattan apartment you’ve ever seen in your life, plus a month’s let on a duplex in Aspen for the winter, and a house on Fire Island for the summer.
