Deep and Silent Waters Read Online Free PDF Page B

looks so she had never even daydreamed about being a model. She couldn’t believe the startling metamorphosis Bernie had wrought in her, changing the gangling schoolgirl she knew from her mirror into a languid-eyed siren, but nothing would have stopped her grabbing Bernie’s offer with both hands.
    ‘I want to do it,’ she said, an obstinate expression settling over her eyes and mouth. ‘I don’t want to go to college, I want to be a model, if he says I can.’
    She had to finish her exams first, however, because neither of her parents would hear of her leaving before the end of that school year. Her mother hoped she might change her mind, and continued throughout those months to point out she was not a swan but an ugly duckling, clumsy, graceless, awkward.
    ‘You’ll never be pretty, so don’t let that man pull the wool over your eyes. I don’t know what his game is, but I don’t trust him. Don’t be a fool, Laura. Go to college, get a good education and a good job afterwards.’
    But Laura was counting the days. She couldn’t wait to leave for London and get away from her mother’s drip, drip, drip of criticism.
    When she began modelling, success came almost immediately and, with it, temptations of the kind her parents had feared, but Laura was always too tired to stay out late after working all day on her feet, and the clubs only began to swing at around ten or eleven at night. She wasn’t attracted by smoky nightclubs, drugs or drink. She had one or two brief relationships with men, but they didn’t mean much to her. She had fun with them, enjoyed their company, but never fell in love. Then, when she was twenty-one, she was chosen to be the ‘face’ of a famous perfume house for a year.
    ‘You’ll have to turn down any other offers during the run of the contract. We can’t have your face appearing anywhere else,’ she was told. ‘That’s why you’ll be paid such big fees. You can’t earn anything from anyone else. From now on you’re ours exclusively.’
    She didn’t hesitate – the money involved was far too big and the coverage was saturating. Everywhere she went Laura saw her own face, huge and terrifying, barely recognisable at that size, staring down from billboards. She saw it on the backs of glossy magazines, alive and shimmering on television screens – you couldn’t miss it unless you lived on a desert island. It made it impossible for her to go out alone.
    She couldn’t walk through the streets, take a peaceful stroll in one of the beautiful London parks, visit Harrods or Selfridges. She was driven everywhere, and suddenly acquired minders: big, muscled men with faces like scrubbed turnips who could toss people aside as if they were matchsticks.
    The casual, light-hearted relationships she had had with young men, more friends than lovers, ended – the strain of being followed everywhere by the
paparazzi
made them irritable, and none of them wished to see themselves photographed with her and speculated about in the tabloid gossip columns.
    ‘It’s like being under siege! I’m sick of it!’ she complained to Bernie.
    ‘Go back home for a while, visit your family. It’s time for some rest and recuperation,’ he advised, and that was what she did. It felt strange, at first, to be back there, treated as a child again, with her parents, in the wild, green, lonely places of her childhood after the four years she had spent in London, but she gradually felt her pulse slow to the quiet beat of days that were always the same.
    Since the moment when she had first met Bernie, Laura had believed in fate. You could call it chance, good luck, or pure coincidence, but whatever it was Laura believed some agency operated in her life that made the wheels of opportunity turn and directed her along the right path. During those days in the old farmhouse she felt as it she was drifting, waiting for a tide to turn and carry her onward. She didn’t know what she wanted to do next, she simply felt