‘Gotta keep my strength up. Gotta lotta sights to see.’
It was a lifeline, the sightseeing. As soon as they finished breakfast Jay bought her a guidebook and they retraced the steps of yesterday’s walk. Only this time they went inside the palaces, the museums, the galleries. Jay offered to buy her an instant camera but she refused.
‘I want to drink it in. Hold it in my memory. I can’t do that if I’m peering through a little hole taking pictures all the time,’ she said crisply. Adding conscientiously, ‘But thank you.’
He nodded. ‘You’re a real original, aren’t you?’
She sent him a swift look. ‘Not so ordinary, after all?’
Jay sighed. ‘I knew I should never have told you that.’
She had got her exuberance back. Okay, some of it was performance. But some of it was the sheer energy of last night.
Zoe danced along beside a weathered stone wall. ‘I forgive you.’
‘Thank you,’ he said gravely.
She knew she was being teased. She turned round and skipped backwards in front of him, looking wicked.
‘Who wants to be a rotten old spin doctor anyway?’
The thin handsome face lit with laughter. ‘Oh, quite. You sound like my Indian grandfather.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Sounds like a good guy.’
‘Yes.’ His face softened wonderfully when he talked about his Indian grandfather, she saw. ‘That’s more or less what he said the last time I saw him.’ His eyes were very green. He looked away. ‘He did not like what I’d become. He’d like it even less now.’
Zoe stopped dead. Big stuff coming, she thought.
She said carefully, ‘Do you? Dislike what you’ve become, I mean?’
He hesitated. ‘Maybe.’
She sucked her teeth. After a pause, she said, ‘Know why?’
He came back from whatever dark place he had been visiting. ‘I do, and it’s all too easy for me.’ He hesitated, as if he was struggling for words. ‘When I was running I had to train every day, in a structured way. No quick fixes. No spin, if you like. I was as good as I deserved to be. Oh, sometimes I got a little lucky. But I couldn’t talk my performance up. If it was sub-standard, it was sub-standard. I couldn’t argue with the results.’
She digested this. ‘Yes—but life is not as simple as a race, is it?
Jay looked at her, arrested. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, when you do one of your public relations campaigns you’re telling people about values. Not just about who won. About how you measure the winning.’ She stopped. ‘I don’t now what I’m talking about. Sorry.’
Jay said slowly, ‘For a woman who is suspicious of spin doctoring you are making a lot of sense.’
But Zoe was embarrassed. She started walking again, energetically, to hide the fact. ‘How did you get into PR anyway?’
Jay’s face lit with spontaneous amusement. ‘Selfdefence.’
Zoe goggled. ‘What?’
‘It was after I won my first big medal. A couple of journalists made a complete prat of me. Entirely my own fault. So I thought—I’ll look into this. Next time I won I got the story I wanted into the press—and athletics got the boost it should have done first time around. So then I thought— there’s a job here. I’ve been passing on what I learned then ever since.’
‘I see,’ said Zoe slowly. She thought about the research she had done for his speech tomorrow. ‘But it’s more than that, isn’t it? I mean, it’s about more than celebrities planting stories?’
‘Yes.’
‘So tell me about that.’
But he flung up a hand. ‘It’s my day off. You want to hear the Jay Christopher Philosophy of Public Relations, you listen to my speech tomorrow.’
She was surprised. She had not been at all sure that he was going to let her go to the conference. She’d half expected him to hide the fact that she was with him. It broke all his professional rules, after all.
‘You want me to come? Really?’
‘Couldn’t do it without you,’ he said lightly.
She didn’t believe him. But it warmed her almost as much as if she did.