Love in High Places Read Free Page A

used the wrong rinse on Lou’s hair — even more unfortunate than it sounded, for the manageress was merely giving her a trial, and Lou was a special customer — and while the result was not quite disastrous, it would have been inflamed anyone less unpredictable than Lou. She had actually laughed, and pleaded for Valentine to be given another chance, and because the manageress could not afford to offend the only daughter of an Oil King, Valentine was given another chance, and she and Lou became in short space of time quite firm friends.
    It was really an extraordinary relationship that grew up between them, for Lou confided in the English girl to such an extent that Valentine frequently felt embarrassed, and invited her to lunch at the Morgan’s palatial New York home. Then she invited her for the week-end, found out all about her — or as much as Valentine cared that anyone should find out about her — and offered her a job. First as companion-secretary, and then as companion-personal maid.
    Valentine often wished she had more talent for typing letters and receiving dictation than she had for adjusting hemlines and invisibly mending lace underwear, for until Lou discovered how invaluable she was in the latter capacity she had had more status. Her father, if he had been still alive, would have felt less horrified to know that his daughter was earning her own living in a very down-to-earth manner if she could have been categorised the equivalent of a black-coated worker, and not transformed into someone whose task it was to turn the bathroom taps, and keep them running at just the right temperature, and brush a golden cloud of hair night and morning (and wash and set it at least three times every week!).
    Not that Valentine herself minded, for it was dull typing letters, and she took a kind of pride in performing a miraculously neat darn. And in America it didn’t seem greatly to matter what she did, so long as she was left in obscurity. But when they went off to Europe, taking in London on the way, she began to feel differently about the freakishness of Fate.
    In London she and her father had once lived very happily together. There was a certain tall town house which she did not dare go near in case it should bring back all too vividly days that were dead and done with. And in the pleasant countryside, quite close to London there was another house beside the river ...
    She had prayed that Lou would not want to see too much of England, or linger too long, and fortunately the American girl had had other plans, and they had gone on to Paris, where there was less likelihood of someone who had once known Valentine well bumping into her accidentally and demanding to know where she had been hiding herself. And after Paris there was Monte Carlo and Nice, then Florence and Rome, where they passed the strangest Christmas Valentine had ever known, and Lou became involved with an Italian prince who was so plainly after her money that even she recognised she had had a lucky escape when another heiress caught his roving Italian eye.
    And now they were high up in the mountains of Austria, so far from the weathered thatch of an Oxfordshire village beside the Thames, and the hum of Piccadilly, that Valentine felt she could safely draw breath again, and take a certain amount of pleasure in her new and altered life.
    For one discovery she had made was that there are moments of happiness in every way of life, even moments of satisfaction and exaltation. One did not need to be rich and secure to enjoy a sunset, and the beauties of the world are free for everyone to gaze at. She could go out in the early morning with nothing at all in her pocket, but the feel of the sun and the wind on her face could make her suddenly quite content.
    There were also moments when she was not content — when she knew there were a great many things that she secretly craved — but these were controllable moments. The one thing she found it extraordinarily