My Fair Man. Jane Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ of a celebrity in business circles. He was the current enfant terrible of advertising, responsible for a series of shocking campaigns – most famously the nineties relaunch of a fifties-style uplift bra that had featured a number of provocative posters that had been outrageously successful. His presence round the table would impress the Chairman (who would probably also be happy to talk about uplift bras).

      Toby was a little worried that Hattie might get into some awful philosophical debate with Jon that might cause problems but he felt sure that Claire would be able to deflect any trouble.

      Hattie was so keen to make amends for her behaviour that week that she offered, when they had finished their meal, to run him a hot bath and give him a massage. Whilst he sat in the bath she warmed some aromatherapy oil and turned down the lights in their bedroom.

      Sensuality did not come easily to Hattie. She had been, her mother had always said, a late bloomer sexually. Her periods had not started until she was nearly sixteen and she had never had the kind of teen crushes enjoyed by her female peers. Toby had been her first serious boyfriend. Her obvious lack of experience and confidence – she had grown up in the shadow of her mother’s legendary beauty – had never really left her, and at times like these – massaging her man as an obvious prelude to sex – she felt as if she were only playing at being grown-up. She was doing – out of a sense of duty really – what she had read women should do in the women’s magazines she occasionally, rather furtively, bought. It didn’t give her any sense of pleasure. In fact she felt rather absurd, sitting astride Toby’s back, working warm oil into his well-toned body. But even though she doubted the skill of her touch he seemed to like it and within a very few minutes he had turned over and grabbed her so that, feeling even more awkward and ill at ease, she was sitting astride Toby’s front working his cock into her pale, slender body.

      Because of the seriousness of the crime that Lisa had committed – the actual charge was attempted murder – Hattie was seeing her three times a week. It was, she thought, probably the most difficult case of her career. Generally her patients tended to be either adolescents involved in less severe criminal cases (referred on by juvenile courts) or young children who were the victims of some kind of abuse. It was unusual to encounter a child of Lisa’s age – she was just nine – who had been involved in a violent crime.

      They had already fallen into a routine in their sessions. The first half an hour or so they would sit together on the little sofa in Hattie’s office and look at the books. Lisa loved books, probably because they had been denied her by her parents. Each time she came she would pick a book for Hattie to read. And then, if it was progressing well and Lisa was relaxed, they would try to talk about those things that might have a bearing on her behaviour – her parents, her siblings, their Church, her isolation at her school.

      Today she had picked out a Roald Dahl book for Hattie to read – The BFG – and, as she had opened the first page, Lisa had crept up and sat on her lap looking uncertainly at Hattie, fearful that she might – like so many other people who knew the details of her crime – recoil from her.

      Hattie smiled at her, eager to encourage the trust she was building up with the child. She had come to see Lisa as she might any other patient – as damaged, vulnerable and in desperate need of affection and acceptance. She put one arm around her as she read and Lisa laid her head against Hattie’s shoulder.

      She seemed genuinely absorbed in The BFG, smiling at the funny bits, looking a little concerned about the frightening moment when the heroine, Sophie, was snatched from her bed by a twenty-four-foot giant.

      ‘He’s like Goliath …’ she said.

      ‘Who, Lisa?’

      ‘The BFG,’ she said eagerly, ‘and Sophie is like David.’

      Lisa’s allusion to the story of David and Goliath was the only indication in her reaction to Roald Dahl’s sometimes sinister story that gave Hattie any inkling that she was at all different from any other child of her age. Most nine-year-olds had a fascination for the macabre, the gruesome and the grotesque. It was just that for Lisa the bloodcurdling stories that had ruled her early life had not been taken from the fairy tales of regular children’s fiction. They had come from the Bible.

      ‘I’ll have to finish there, Lisa, because we have run out of time. But we’ll read some more next time.’

      ‘Oh please,’ said Lisa, giving Hattie such a sweet smile that she was suddenly moved to hug her.

      ‘Are they being kind to you at Linton House?’ Hattie said gently.

      Lisa looked down at the floor.

      ‘Don’t you like it there?’

      ‘They don’t let me play with the other children …’ she said, tears falling down her face, ‘and when Mummy comes to see me I don’t want her to go.’

      It was the first time that Lisa had cried and Hattie leant down and held her, and attempted to offer her comfort. After Lisa had left, led reluctantly away by a social worker, Hattie replayed the tape she had recorded of that afternoon’s session.

      Some days, and this was one of them, Hattie found her work emotionally exhausting. God knows, she thought as she prepared to leave the office later that evening, how she was going to cope with Toby’s dinner party. As she put Lisa’s notes in her briefcase to take home to study further, she wondered if she would be able to put aside her work – the fate of this little girl – in order to be that weekend the woman Toby wanted her to be.

      Hattie emerged from the changing room wearing the dress Toby had chosen. The way in which she hunched her shoulders made it quite obvious – at least to the sales assistant – that she wasn’t comfortable in the tight cream sheath, but Toby loved it. Although it would never have occurred to Hattie to buy such a dress (and she was nervous of looking at herself in the shop mirror) it was, in fact, perfect on her.

      Hattie’s lack of sexual confidence extended to her choice of clothes, and she felt now, as she finally examined her reflection in the softly lit mirror, like a little girl wearing her mother’s clothes, a ridiculous impostor pretending to be a woman.

      Claire, who spent a great deal of time, money and artifice on her own appearance, was often amazed at Hattie’s disinterest in clothes and make-up and astonished by her lack of vanity. Claire had long since given up trying to persuade Hattie that she was beautiful. She understood that her friend had some deep-seated physical inferiority complex prompted by the fact that she was so very different from her infamously lovely mother and her celebrated sister.

      While Hattie’s mother had brilliant blue eyes and straight, shiny white-blonde hair (even now at fifty-seven) her younger daughter was born with brown eyes and thick, dark curls that she struggled to control. And while both her mother and her elder sister, Arabella, were tall but shapely (they had breasts where Hattie had the merest hint of pectorals) she was short and skinny.

      In company her mother had referred to the teenage Hattie as ‘the changeling’ or would say, when anyone remarked on her daughter’s looks, ‘She is a genetic throwback.’ And as a result Hattie had never been able to see her own particular beauty.

      ‘It would look good with a high heel, I think,’ the fawning shop assistant now said to Toby as they studied the embarrassed Hattie. ‘Suede stilettos …’

      Inwardly Hattie groaned at the thought of having to wear this dress and high heels. Had she been able to get away with a pair of black opaque tights and some loafers she might have felt happier but the idea of being forced to wear a pair of sheer glossy stockings СКАЧАТЬ