‘You know he’s worth fifty times what your father is, don’t you?’ she said gently. ‘Now, I’m not saying that should directly influence your reply,
but—’
‘Hang on, Mummy! What reply?’
‘To his proposal of marriage, of course. I can see he’s a slow mover, but I predict our Mr Mackenzie will be on bended knee by the end of the month. The thing is, darling . . . well,
I know it’s a terrible cliché, but you could do worse. A lot worse.’
‘I realise that.’
‘Daddy’s happy to go on giving you and Stella the annual allowance indefinitely, you know that too, so this isn’t about your father and I looking to get you off the books, as
it were. We just—’
Diana carefully put her fingertips over her mother’s mouth.
‘It’s all right, Mummy, I know exactly what you’re trying to say and I understand perfectly. And just so you know, I’ve been thinking about this long and hard, and . . .
well, I think I know what my answer’s going to be. Don’t either you or Daddy worry about it. I’m going to do the right thing – the right thing for
all
of
us.’
Diana waited for Maxine to arrive at the villa while she got ready to leave for Nice, less than twenty minutes’ taxi ride away. Maxine was Stella’s language tutor
and erstwhile nanny. She lived in the neighbouring village of St Paul de Vence with her parents, and worked part-time in one of the many patisseries there, on the pre-dawn shifts helping to knead
and shape dozens and dozens of croissants. She was usually finished by eight o’clock and at the villa by nine, almost always carrying a paper bag of warm, freshly baked pastries. Maxine was a
natural tutor; after only a month of coaching, Stella’s French was impressive, almost as functional as her parents’.
Douglas and Diana had had intensive private lessons in written and spoken French in the months before they left England.
‘If I’m to make the most of this opportunity down there, it’s no good my relying on translators and interpreters,’ Douglas had told Diana. ‘I’ll simply be
cheated blind. And you must speak the language properly too, darling, otherwise you’ll be terribly lonely. Most British expats still haven’t returned to the South of France, even though
things have been getting back to normal since the war ended.’
Douglas had spotted an opening in a string of import-export markets, with Nice and Marseilles the twin hubs. He sold his British company for the kind of money that made front-page headlines in
every newspaper, as well as dominating the
Financial Times
for almost a week, took a train to the South of France, and pounced.
Diana hadn’t needed much persuading to move to Provence. When Douglas first tentatively raised the idea with her, she had gone out and bought every guidebook to the Côte d’Azur
she could find. Most of them were old pre-war editions, but she was thrilled at their descriptions of the Mediterranean coast, from Monaco to Marseilles. The climate sounded too good to be true.
Mild, sunny winters, early springs with properly warm days beginning as early as March, and long, hot summers lasting all the way through to October. The coldest months were December and January,
but even then there were plenty of fine, sunny days.
She lingered over photographs of orange trees lining the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, the fruit falling with casual abundance onto the pavements, while the Mediterranean surf washed the
curving, scimitar-shaped beach just a few yards across the road. Diana was utterly seduced.
There was more to wonder at. Inland lay great sweeping fields of lavender, vibrant and stunningly beautiful under the almost violent summer sun. And further north and east, rising like jagged
teeth towards Italy and Switzerland, lay the Alps: colossal peaks which dwarfed anything Britain had to offer, glittering white with snow in winter; bare rock flushed in the sunrises and sunsets of
summer. Diana’s favourite photograph showed a grinning boy eating a freshly picked orange on the beach in Nice, with the Alps filling the horizon behind him like a chorus of giants.
The contrast between the sleepy, densely wooded countryside in which the Dower House dozed, or the flat fenlands that lay around Cambridge, could hardly have been greater. Diana was genuinely
fond of the English landscape that had formed the backdrop to her youth, but they didn’t quicken her pulse as these exotic images of Provence did now.
She showed the books to Stella. Her daughter was solemn.
‘It looks lovely, but what about all my friends in Sevenoaks? I’ll miss them like anything, Mummy. And what if I can’t speak French properly? I won’t be able to make new
friends.’ She sighed. ‘Do we
have
to go?’
Diana was ready for this.
‘No, we don’t have to go, but I think we should. It’ll be an adventure. And you will learn French; it’s much easier for children to speak another language than it is for
grown-ups. I’ll make you two promises, though, Stella. First, your friends can come and stay in the holidays as often and for as long as they like. Douglas and I will arrange all of that,
their trains and things . . . and two, if you really are unhappy there, we’ll come back home to England. All I ask is that you give it a try. Is that fair?’
Stella had cautiously agreed and now, six weeks after the family had arrived in a deluge, the irony of which was not lost on anyone, she seemed to be settling in. She had yet to begin school but
as Diana had predicted, Stella was picking up good, idiomatic French with astonishing speed. In a few months she would be fluent. Meanwhile Maxine had a younger sister about Stella’s age and
the two girls had, shyly at first, become friends.
It was going to be all right.
Douglas had been up earlier that morning than any of them, and would now be sitting in his beautiful new office on the Croisette in Cannes, just a couple of hundred yards down
from the Carlton Hotel. It wasn’t his main office – that was 100 miles away in the port of Marseilles – but with imaginative use of telephone and telegram, he was able to spend
Mondays and Tuesdays in Cannes, Wednesdays and Thursdays in Marseilles and be home in time for dinner with his wife and stepdaughter on Friday evenings.
In any case, he loved the Cannes office, with its picture windows offering views straight out over the beaches and the sea on the other side of the Croisette. Sometimes Diana joined him there
for lunch and they would eat at one of the beach restaurants affiliated to the grand hotels opposite, or even on the terrace of the Carlton, the grandest of the lot.
Like the rest of the Côte d’Azur, Cannes had had a ‘good war’. Safe in the southern de-militarised zone of Vichy, most Germans to come there were tourists, officers on
leave from Occupied France to the north. Some of them even brought their families with them. France may have fallen, but it was business as usual on the Riviera. Hotels like the Carlton had
thrived.
Nobody mentioned those days now.
Back at the villa, Diana let Maxine in through the heavy oak door that opened onto the shady front porch, jasmine covering the tiled roof and lemon trees in giant terracotta pots flanking the
broad steps that swept up to the door.
‘
Bonjour
, Maxine.’
‘
Bonjour, madame
.’ Diana couldn’t persuade the young woman to call her by her Christian name. She was discovering just how punctilious the French could be about their
social manners; Maxine, at twenty, simply felt too young to be on first-name terms with an older woman who was also her employer.
‘It is not suitable,’ was all she replied when Diana raised the subject, and that was that. But Maxine was far less formal with Stella, embracing her, kissing her cheeks, and asking
whether she wanted her lesson in
le salon
or by
la piscine
.
‘Oh the pool, the pool,’ cried Stella, and the two of them hurried down the stairs that led to the pool terrace outside.
‘Wear a hat and be careful not to burn,’ Diana called from the
salon
, but her daughter was gone. Distant giggles floated up from the stairwell.
Diana’s gaze fell on the photograph of James and John on the mantelpiece. Stella was the image of James; it was odd how firstborns so often took after their fathers. She had inherited
James’s piercing blue eyes, straight nose and ironic smile. And the resemblance was not just physical: the child had many of her father’s mannerisms, including his tendency, when he
wished to make a particular point, to lower his voice rather than raise it.
Diana saw James in her daughter every single day.
She sighed, picked up her keys and handbag, and left by the front door, remembering to double-lock it behind her. One of the things the guidebooks had carefully omitted to say was that petty
crime and burglary were common all along the Côte d’Azur. The villa’s previous occupant had been vociferous on the point.
‘The li’l bastards come in through the front door when you’re down by the pool,’ he said. ‘So you have to lock the door, even when there’s folks in the house.
They even come in through an open window when you’re having lunch or supper or suchlike in another room. That’s why I had to put these goddamn bars all over the place. One night after
supper I came into the kitchen and one of the li’l bastards had his head in the fridge. But he was too quick for me – back out of the window like a scalded cat.’
He swung his golf club. ‘That’s why I walk around with this thing. Next time it happens I’ll be ready!’
Diana walked down the paved drive that opened onto the single-track lane leading to St Paul de Vence. She pressed the concealed button on her side of the electric gate and it slid slowly open on
its runners. She walked through and a few moments later heard it quietly rumble back into place behind her.
St Paul was less than five minutes’ walk away. As she rounded a screen of cyprus trees, the village came into view on her left. In some ways it reminded her of Hever Castle. Like her home
village in Kent, St Paul was defined by its massive fortifications. It crouched on a steep hill, enclosed by a colossal medieval wall topped with ramparts. The village houses clustered within, like
sheep in a pen. Narrow streets rose steeply to St Paul’s crown jewel, the fifteenth-century church with its tall, sleek belltower of pale stone. Diana had yet to climb the tower but she had
heard that the views from the top were breathtaking: to the north, the Alps, to the south, the glittering sea; Africa hidden below the distant blue-hazed horizon.
She walked through the remains of the outer fortifications and into the main square, where already local men were playing
boules
outside the Café de la Place, the village’s
principal meeting-point. Others sat at the café’s tables along its shady terrace, reading newspapers and sipping small glasses of beer.
Diana couldn’t understand how anyone could drink anything stronger than coffee at nine in the morning, but here it was routine. She watched a waiter delivering a tray bearing three glasses
of wine and what looked like two small cognacs to a group of women at an end table. They were off-duty hotel cleaners, dressed in pink pinafores and caps, their mops stacked neatly against the
café’s wall.
No wonder so many people here succumb to cirrhosis of the liver, Diana thought as she walked across the square to the taxi-rank on the far side. The driver of the car at the head of the line saw
her coming and stubbed out his cigarette.
‘
Oui, madame?
’
‘
Bonjour, monsieur
. Nice, please. The Cours Saleya.’
‘
Mon plaisir, madame
.’
She saw him looking at her legs as she climbed into the back of the cab and sighed inwardly. The man must be seventy, if he was a day.
The Cours Saleya was the street that bisected Nice’s Old Town, just behind the eastern end of the Promenade des Anglais. All the city’s best restaurants and cafés were there,
many of them clustered around the old flower-market, where Diana was headed. She came here almost every morning. It had become something of a ritual for her. She would read the local paper, listen
to the conversations that flowed and pulsed around her, and thus improve her French.
Even by the time she got there, well before ten o’clock, most of the day’s business would be over. Stallholders were busy hosing down the cobbles around their pitches, and many were
preparing to meet up at one of the cafés for a stupendous, and very early, lunch. If one had been up and working since before three in the morning, the stomach decreed that lunch should be
taken no later than half past ten.
The taxi dropped her off at the Opera House and she walked the rest of the way, keeping to the shady side of the street. The sun was properly up now and she didn’t want her make-up to
run.
Sure enough, the flower-market was pretty much done for the day when she arrived. For a few centimes, she managed to buy an enormous bouquet of pink and white lilies just before they were tossed
into the back of the trader’s evilly smoking diesel flatbed Ford – at this time of day stallholders were practically giving away what remained of their stock – and crossed the
road to her favourite pavement café.
The
patron
looked up from his newspaper as Diana stepped up onto the low wooden terrace which kept customers’ feet dry when the market was being hosed down
,
and waved to
her. He’d grown fond of the beautiful Englishwoman who had been coming to his café for the past month. She looked enchanting this morning, he thought, carrying her flowers and
manoeuvring her way delicately between the little tables to her usual place. He half-wished he had bought the bouquet for her, before reminding himself he was a married man on the wrong side of
fifty and long past such foolishness.
He was in the habit of greeting Diana each morning with a little joke, which he insisted on delivering in heavily accented English.
‘
Bonjour, madame!
’
‘Bonjour, Armand
– go on, then.’
The café-owner mopped his bald head with a pristine white handkerchief, which he replaced in the front pocket of his apron. Then he folded his hands carefully over a round belly, his
waxed and pointed moustache twitching as his mouth made a little
moue
of excitement.