Tara (63 page)

It was good to smell the bales of cloth again, to hear the traffic rumbling by and Marc Bolan's 'Ride a White Swan' blasting out from the shop below. She would go over to Kensington Market at lunch-time and buy herself something extravagant from the antique clothes stall.

'That's sweet of you, Josh,' Tara was touched by his concern. He had come down for the funeral and asked Greg if he could help with the funeral expenses> but perhaps his real contribution had been giving her so much time off without hassling her.

As much as she'd hated to leave her mother, she was actually relieved to be back at work. All that emotion had drained her, and drawing had always been the perfect way to recharge her batteries.

Josh was straight today, his eyes soft and gentle again, his big lips curved in a genuine smile of welcome. There had been a bouquet of flowers for her and cards of sympathy from all the girls in his shops.

'You know how much I liked your grandmother,' he said, perching on a desk by her drawing board. 'She was like the Jewish matriarchs, formidable but a great character. Amy must be finding it tough without her.'

'She found it tough with her,' Tara blurted out and within minutes she found herself telling Josh far more than she meant to.

'You'll feel better now,' Josh predicted as he gave her a brotherly hug and dried her eyes with his handkerchief. 'Maybe she had her reasons for giving you the farm. Maybe she had a reason to distrust Greg.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Tara snapped. 'Greg's a wonderful man!'

'Well, I suppose your gran's instincts could be off-beam sometimes. She liked me, didn't she!'

Tara laughed and suddenly she felt better. 'You are a ray of sunshine,' she said. 'It's time I put it all behind me.'

Gran's death and the end of a decade made Tara more aware that she could no longer just drift on as she had before.

Somehow 1970 seemed different. Flower Power was dying, revolution no longer seemed imminent. The innocence was dead, a new generation of teenagers was springing up who were more materialistic and showy. Platform shoes and maxi skirts were coming in and, instead of living by the maxim 'Turn on and drop out', people were cutting their long hair and working their way back in.

Ideas were running around in her head, clamouring to be put down on paper. Not just for actual garments, but fabric designs with bold, swirling colours. She began to be irritated by the limitations of Josh's empire, casting a jaundiced eye not only on the designs she did for him, but on his policies.

Everything had to be cheap. Fabric, trimmings, even the cut of the garment was influenced by the need for economy. She longed to produce sumptuous evening dresses in chiffon and silk, use lavish embroidery, applique, sequins and beads. She would look at Ossie Clark's designs with all their rich crepe, covered buttons and swirling skirts, and feel green with envy.

One afternoon, when Josh had wandered into the workroom to show her his new platform boots, she decided it was time she showed him her ideas. He stood in the doorway, wearing green trousers so tight he had an indecent bulge in the front. They flared out at the knee to twenty-six-inch bottoms, and then the boots!

'What do you think of them?' He grinned like a schoolboy. 'I always wanted to be six foot!'

They looked ridiculous, but then so did mini skirts at first, and at least these were plain black, not the multicoloured ones she'd seen on some people.

'Ask me in a couple of weeks when I've got used to you towering over me!' she laughed. 'How long did it take to practise walking in them?'

'I nearly broke my ankle when I came out the shop in them,' he admitted. 'But you do like them, don't you?'

She saw no good reason for being brutally honest and she nodded. 'They're groovy,' she said, turning her head away so he wouldn't see her laughing. 'Now come and look at these!'

He rolled a joint, as he always did these days, and just sat and smoked while she turned the sketches over for him to see.

'They're all breathtaking,' he agreed. 'But not for us.'

He had noticed a new maturity in Tara even before the old girl's death. But since she'd come back to London it was stronger. She invariably wore long skirts now, with her lovely gold hair pinned up. He liked this new Tara. She had poise and elegance, without losing any of her warmth. He sensed, too, that she was disenchanted with Harry's club and her lack of social life and this was making her ambitious again. Maybe it was time he made a bit more fuss of her?

'Can't we produce a range of special clothes?' she begged him. 'Just a few trial ones to put in the windows and make people stop in their tracks?'

Josh had his own worries right now, although he was concealing them well. Bailiffs had called at the Oxford Street shop only a few days earlier for unpaid rent; he owed the Inland Revenue several thousand, too. Although he knew Tara's ideas were good, he hadn't got any spare money to waste on frivolous schemes right now.

'It wouldn't work.' He shook his head and laughed. He had no intention of telling her the truth. 'We have to stick at what we do best. I know my market and if I move away from it I'll lose it.'

'But, Josh, the shops are looking grotty,' she said. 'You've flooded them with all that Indian stuff.'

'That's what's selling.' He drew on his joint and switched the radio on. 'Listen to that,' he said as David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' came on.

Tara watched him patiently.

'Ground control to Major Tom,' he sang, playing an air guitar like a teenager, tossing his black curls. 'Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.'

She had to laugh, he was totally immersed in the song. Once it had finished she switched the radio off.

'Will you listen to me?'

'Come on then, what is it? More money?'

'The sales are down, Josh,' she said quietly. 'We're selling more Indian junk because that's just about all we've got.'

'The sales aren't down! Whoever told you that?' He opened his eyes wide and once again she saw only pupils and little of the iris.

'Because I stand in the shop from time to time and watch, like you should do,' she said. She was sick of the smell of joss-sticks, of hearing 'All You Need is Love' on tapes. "The only time you spend in there is when you're trying to get a girl in the stockroom.'

'Well, I've got other business interests, too,' he said airily.

She didn't know if this was true, but it didn't concern her anyway.

'Real customers are getting more discriminating. I don't mean the hippy-trippy ones who wander in for a new cheesecloth smock, but the people with money,' she said. 'I see them every day examining hems and linings. Over in Kensington Market girls much like me are opening up stalls selling wonderful clothes and we're losing trade to them. If you don't pull the business back together pretty sharply, you won't have one much longer.'

'You sound just like my dad.' He laughed, but he was touched that she cared so much. 'Stop worrying, Tara. Be cool.'

Despite her anxiety that Josh was losing his grip, she found him easier to work for than ever before. He wouldn't go along with her ideas about revamping the shops and their image, but he did let her have her own way about designs as long as they could be produced cheaply. He often came to the workroom late in the afternoon to discuss something with her, and if she wasn't rushing home to see Harry it sometimes went on over a drink or a pizza.

The first time he asked her to go with him to a trade fair in Birmingham, she was hesitant. Not because she didn't want to go, but because Harry might misconstrue the relationship.

She adored Harry, but in his world she was just a pretty decoration, his 'bird' as one of his henchmen once called her. No-one at the Top Cat Club cared about what she did. The trade fair gave her wider vision, she met people who were passionately interested in the same things as her, and the ambitions she'd had before she started her affair with Harry came back more strongly than before.

The novelty of going to the club had long since worn off. Harry was always too busy to sit with her for long, and she had little in common with his cronies. It was better to see him away from the club, two or three hours before it opened, on his night off and Sundays. Their romance was one of snatched moments, full of high passion but with never enough time to share one another's interests, friends or even to really talk.

She needed a life of her own. When Josh asked her to go with him to mills and factories instead of staying in the workroom all day, she went, seeing it purely as a way of furthering her knowledge about the industry.

It was a night away in Paris that sparked the row, and all at once her grandmother's observations about Harry seemed a great deal less ridiculous.

Josh always went to see the Paris collections. He claimed he learned nothing from them, that it was all hype and the glorification of a few designers who made clothes only for the super-rich. But he thought it was time Tara experienced it, too.

Everything was totally above board. They left Heathrow at the crack of dawn on a Thursday morning and were back on Friday night. They had separate rooms in the hotel and there was no time for romantic boat rides along the Seine or whatever else Harry thought they might have been up to. But she was stimulated by what she'd seen. It was as if a curtain was pulled back to reveal a world of beautiful people, with exotic lifestyles. She wanted to design for them, not for little office girls with ten pounds to spend.

Best of all though, Josh seemed to be coming round to her way of thinking. On the plane home he said he was going to look into his finances with a view to a complete update.

Josh dropped her off in his taxi just after ten. Tara limped up the steps of the house; her feet hurt, she was exhausted, hot and sticky.

To her surprise Harry was sitting in her flat. He had his own key so he could come in late at night without disturbing anyone, but he rarely came round without phoning.

'Hello.' She grinned weakly as she flung her overnight case down. 'I didn't expect to see you!'

He didn't jump up from the settee to kiss her, there was no bright smile which said he'd missed her, no concern at her looking tired. Instead he stared at her slinky velvet maxi dress with a split up to her thigh, and it was obvious he disapproved.

'How come Josh didn't come in for a nightcap? Did he spot my car?'

Tara flopped down in an armchair, took off her shoes and massaged her toes. She didn't like Harry's tone.

'Neither of us were looking for your car,' she said, still rubbing her feet. 'We were both too tired to think about anything other than going to bed.'

Harry looked closely at Tara. It was some time since he'd seen her dressed up and she looked like a new girl. She wore her hair up, loose tendrils escaping at the neck. It made her seem older, more sophisticated. The combination of those alluring amber eyes and her wide pouting mouth was enough to make any man catch his breath. In the last couple of years she'd gained a little weight, just enough to make her more curvy. Her brown velvet dress wasn't tight but it clung to her body; he could see her hipbones slightly protruding, the cleft in her buttocks and her breasts jiggled as she moved. In that second he would gladly have locked her up so no man could look at her.

'You've been hitting the high spots, then?'

Tara looked up. Harry was in his dinner jacket and bow-tie ready for the club, his hair tied back in a pony-tail, and for a second she had a flash of one of his haughtier customers, the Hon Nigel Fitz-Makepeace, a man Harry called 'A prat of the first water'.

'You sound like Nigel the Prat,' she giggled. 'Hitting the high spots indeed!'

'Don't you take the piss out of me!' Harry jumped up and reached her in two big strides.

She thought he was going to hit her and involuntarily drew back, protecting her head with her arm.

'You must have done something to make you look so guilty.' He caught hold of her arm and twisted it slightly away from her face. 'I wasn't going to hit you.'

'I was neither taking the piss nor looking guilty,' she snapped back at him. 'And wouldn't anyone flinch when a man of your size and strength charges at them like a wild boar?'

'You've been up to something,' he insisted. "That dress is hardly the thing to wear on a plane!'

As she moved to protect herself, she had revealed a flash of thigh. She looked down and swiftly covered it.

'I'm a fashion designer,' she said through clenched teeth. 'Maxi dresses are high fashion everywhere other than the Top Cat Club and, if you must know, we spent most of the time rushing about, talking to people about really thrilling things like buttons, accessories and industrial machines.'

'Did you sleep with Josh?' he asked, his voice as cold as his eyes.

'If you have to ask me that I suggest you fuck off now.' She tilted up her chin, refusing to be browbeaten by him. 'Would I tell you I was going to Paris with him, share a cab back here and not invite him in, if I had slept with him?'

'I don't know you any more,' he said, eyes narrowed. 'You've changed. Once you lived for me popping in to see you, now I've got to make an appointment because you're always gadding about with Josh!'

'I've got a job I care about.' She wriggled to the edge of the settee because she felt intimidated by him standing over her. 'All I'm doing with Josh is learning more about the fashion industry. I'm sorry I wasn't waiting stark naked in the bed for when you wanted to come and give me one. How terrible of me!'

She made to get up, but he pushed her back down. His face was mean-looking and there was a dangerous glint in his eyes.

'I didn't come round here for a screw. I could get that from one of my barmaids if that's all I wanted. I had something to talk to you about, but I'll find someone else to share that with, too.'

'You make me sick,' she shouted, eyes flashing with anger. 'I've had to make a life of my own because you're always stuck in that bloody club with your gamblers and villains. You could have asked me what Paris was like, about the designers I've met, show an interest in me for once. But no, all you think about is you.'