The painting petered out just below the fifth button on his pale-blue cotton uniform shirt, Gwen’s brushstrokes giving way to a few vague charcoal and pencil outlines. If completed, it
would be a full-length portrait.
‘Actually, I’ve been thinking . . . I’m not sure I should do any more with it,’ Gwen said as she settled beside her husband. ‘
He
was unfinished,
wasn’t he? Perhaps that’s how the painting should stay. Unfinished. Like our boy.’
He considered. ‘Yes . . . yes, I must say, I’ve never thought about it like that. I think you may be right.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I’m going to seize the moment,
Gwen. Please say we can hang it in the hall – you know, the empty place we’ve spoken about.’
She hadn’t taken her eyes off the painting.
‘Do you know, I think it really might be time, Oliver. I really do. I believe that I’m ready, at last. Maybe I have been for a while, and didn’t know it. He mustn’t stay
up here hidden away any longer.’ She squeezed his hand in return, ‘We’ll hang it tomorrow, just as it is. And all because you came up here this morning. Thank you.’
She turned to face him. ‘Now, what’s troubling you, my dear?’
Diana made it to the villa just in time. As her taxi disappeared back down the drive she fumbled with the front-door key, trembling fingers making her clumsy. At last she had
the door open and ran across the hall to the little washroom on the other side. She lifted the toilet lid, dropped to her knees, and was violently sick.
‘I must say I’m surprised that the Negresco’s the guilty party,’ Douglas said as he came into their bedroom, holding a damp facecloth wrapped around
crushed ice. ‘Did your fish taste peculiar? You should have sent it back.’
‘Mmm.’ Diana closed her eyes as her husband placed the cold compress on her forehead. ‘Thank you, darling . . . no, the food was fine, Douglas. It must have been the sun. We
were sitting outside on the terrace for an awfully long time and I’d forgotten to bring my hat.’
‘Yes, well, we’re not far from the solstice now,’ he told her, sitting companionably on the edge of the bed. ‘Just a few weeks to go. No wonder you got back home with a
thumping headache.’
‘Migraine, more like. But it’s definitely going now.’
‘Good.’ He put his hand behind her shoulders and helped her into a sitting position, plumping up the pillows behind her. ‘I’ll heat up some of that chicken soup Sophia
made yesterday. I think there’s still some in the fridge.’ Sophia was their Italian maid who occasionally, but always grumpily, cooked for them, before tramping back to St Paul and the
tiny apartment in the medieval walls where she and her parents lived.
‘Anyway, if you’re feeling a bit better, tell me more about this chap you had lunch with,’ Douglas went on. ‘He sounds a most interesting fellow.’
Diana looked directly at her husband. She’d been watching him covertly since he entered the room. She couldn’t help comparing him to James; they were so unalike, she reflected, that
they could almost be two quite different species of man.
Like James, Douglas wore an expensive suit but the sheer bagginess of his body defeated the finest tailoring, rendering the cut more or less shapeless. In any case, Douglas had put on weight
since coming to France and his jacket could no longer be buttoned without looking uncomfortably tight under the arms.
The waistband of his trousers was under strain too, and heavy jowls were beginning to flow over the collar of his shirt. His fair skin meant he tried to keep out of the sun but nevertheless, his
freckles had become more noticeable in recent weeks, and his wispy reddish hair had gone a shade paler.
Diana felt ashamed of noticing these things and, worse, contrasting them unfavourably to the man with whom she had spent the day. She reminded herself how kind and generous Douglas had been to
her and Stella.
But for the first time in their marriage, it suddenly mattered to her that she had never found her husband in any way physically attractive. She began to feel a long-denied restlessness awaken,
and with it a tingle of anxiety. Or was it excitement?
Earlier, she had lain stricken with the worst migraine she’d had in years, trying to decide what to tell Douglas. Part of her wanted to unburden herself of the entire thing, starting with
that April morning in the market when she had first heard James’s voice. But when she struggled to find and rehearse the words, her resolve crumbled.
‘
He sounded like my first husband . . . James . . . I simply had to go back and find him; you can see that, darling, can’t you? Those papers Daddy sent me weren’t what I
told you they were; they were the official RAF report into James’s death . . . I had to read them eventually . . . but I didn’t believe they proved he was dead, I can’t say why .
. . I’m sorry, darling, but I just knew he was alive and I had to find him again.’
She had squirmed. She would sound needy and desperate and secretive and . . . something else.
Disloyal.
Even worse would be the questions Douglas was certain to ask her.
‘
What is he doing here?
’
‘
What does he look like now?
’
‘
Will you see him again?
’
‘
Do you still love him?
’
It couldn’t be borne. Not yet, not now. She needed time to reflect on the impossible thing that had just happened. Absorb it, and decide what it meant. She must find a middle way with
Douglas for the time being; an abridged, acceptable account she could give him, that later perhaps could be expanded and corrected. She promised herself that in time she would tell him
everything.
But now, with her husband sitting unsuspectingly on their bed beside her, Diana censored and skimmed and lied.
‘He’s called Peter. He was a friend of my brother – they were at Cranwell together, and in the same squadron during the war. They both flew sorties over Dunkirk.’
‘I see,’ Douglas said. ‘It was just after Dunkirk that your first husband was shot down, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes . . . Anyway, I was in the flower-market as usual this morning, at Armand’s café, and this chap got out of a taxi more or less in front of me. I thought I recognised him
but I wasn’t sure . . . He knew me though, right away. He came straight over to my table. He shook my hand, said he remembered me from his and John’s passing-out parade at Cranwell, and
from a squadron Christmas party. Apparently we danced together a couple of times.’
She paused to readjust the cold cloth on her brow. Douglas nodded slowly.
‘My. What a coincidence. And, naturally, he’d have known James.’
She’d been expecting him to make these connections, but not quite so quickly. Douglas was being unusually beady.
‘Yes, of course . . . but they weren’t especial friends, and Peter wasn’t one of the chaps who saw James shot down. But they were both in the air over France that day. He
– Peter – told me that he nearly bought it himself; their squadron was horribly outnumbered,’ he said.
‘Did this Peter know James well?’
‘No, I just told you they weren’t particularly friendly. I certainly don’t recall James ever mentioning him.’
‘No? Well . . . what did you talk about over lunch?’
Diana breathed a little easier. They were on safer ground now.
‘Oh, all sorts. About the war, about my brother . . . what I’m doing down here, and him too. He’s something to do with exporting wine from Provence to London.’
Douglas looked interested. ‘Really? I’ve been dabbling in that a little myself recently, did I mention that? What’s his full name? I might have come across him.’
Damn
.
‘D’you know, I simply can’t remember. I think he only mentioned it once, at the café. Dodgson . . . Dobson . . . something like that.’
‘Well, I’ll keep an eye out for him. There can’t be that many English businessmen operating in Nice at the moment.’ He stood up. ‘Right, I’ll go and see about
that soup. Hungry?’
She smiled at him, trying to keep the relief out of her voice. ‘Yes, I am. Thank you, Douglas. You’re so kind to me.’
Gwen looked perplexed. ‘But I thought all that nonsense about James Blackwell being alive was over and done with months ago, Oliver, after you sent Diana the RAF
report.’
Her husband sighed. ‘Perhaps it was. Perhaps I’m imagining things. I just think something’s wrong down there. It could be anything, I suppose, but all my instincts tell me
it’s something to do with him – with her first husband, I mean.’
Gwen folded her hands in her lap. ‘Surely she’s not clinging to the belief he’s still alive, somehow, and floating around Nice?’
He gave a helpless shrug. ‘You wouldn’t think so, not after she’d finally made herself read the report,’ Oliver said. ‘But looking back, I think we – I should
say I – missed something when she telephoned to talk about it.’
‘What do you mean?’
He had taken the call that chilly April morning, which seemed so long ago, now the warmth of June was here. On the face of it, Diana had seemed to accept the RAF’s formal conclusion that
James had died in his Spitfire.
‘You’re obviously right, Daddy,’ she had said. ‘I must have had some sort of delusion the other morning in the market, however convincing it seemed at the
time.’
But there was something else about their conversation; something that hadn’t seemed important at the time.
‘You know what she’s like with words and language, Gwen – so picky and precise. It’s one of the reasons she was doing so well at Girton until . . . until . . .’ He
paused.
‘Until the two of them were killed. Come on, Oliver, what are you trying to say?’ Gwen asked bluntly.
‘Bear with me, Grace, I hardly understand it myself.’
He sat deep in thought.
‘OK,’ he said eventually. ‘Diana agreed that the man in the taxi couldn’t possibly have been James. But then she asked me why I thought the RAF had used the word
“presumed”, you know, in the part that says he must have been killed.
‘I said I’d never really thought about it but it was probably because no actual body was ever found. I told her I didn’t want to upset her, but that James’s remains were
probably still in the wreckage of his aircraft, buried a few feet under some French field. You know how they keep digging them up, Gwen, crashed fighters, British and German, with the pilots still
at the controls. Anyway, I can’t remember exactly what she said to that, but looking back, I
do
recall how she sounded, the tone in her voice.
‘It was hopeful. She sounded
hopeful
. Even as she agreed that James must be dead, there was a kind of disbelief at the same time. I didn’t pick up on it then, I suppose I
didn’t want to. I just wanted the whole rather disturbing business over and done with. And she hardly ever rings us any more, does she? She used to call at least once a week. Now, whenever we
telephone her, she seems preoccupied, and she’s always making excuses to cut the conversation short. Half the time she’s not even there. Douglas says she’s signed up for classes
in French, some kind of intensive course, he said. And she’s completely stopped writing letters, hasn’t she? We haven’t had one in as long as I can remember.’
He fell silent and looked at his wife expectantly. Gwen appeared to be lost in thought.
‘Well?’ he asked at last, a touch impatiently. ‘What do you make of it?’
Gwen sighed. ‘She’s hiding something. That’s obvious, and it’s extremely unusual for her. Her life’s always been an open book, hasn’t it? Diana’s never
been able to keep a secret, not since she could talk.’
He nodded in agreement. ‘Absolutely. Something’s happened to make her so distracted and withdrawn. On the rare occasions we do speak, I can hear something in her voice I’ve
never heard before. It’s hard to describe . . . it’s sort of part-fear, part-elation. She’s totally off-balance.’
Gwen looked at him directly. ‘Do you think she’s having an affair?’
‘Completely.’
‘So do I.’
They sat without speaking for several minutes.
‘What makes you think it has something to do with James Blackwell?’ she asked.
Oliver weighed his reply carefully. ‘All right . . . here’s what I think has happened. I think the illusion that she saw and heard him had a profound effect on her. It was a
particularly vivid hallucination, by the sound of it. I think it’s reminded her of her feelings for him, how passionate they were for each other.’ He gave a half-smile. ‘Remember
how they thought we didn’t know they had slept together on the top floor, the week before their wedding?’
She smiled back. ‘Yes, well, Stella was proof of that, if there’d been any doubt about it.’
‘Quite. Anyway, I think that her illusion or fantasy, or whatever it was, that day in the market has reignited something within her. Some deep need. Let’s face it, Gwen, Douglas may
be a wonderfully kind and generous man, but he’s no Romeo, is he? I always worried about that for Diana.’
Gwen nodded. ‘So did I, but I never admitted it to myself. I was so keen to see her and Stella settled.’
‘Me too. But we didn’t push her into anything, Gwen? Diana made her own choices. Anyway, we are where we are. I suspect her search for James, her refusal to fully believe he’s
dead, is really a search for someone
like
him – someone who’ll excite her and romance her again. And I think she’s found her man.’
Gwen leaned forward, both hands around his face. She held his gaze.
‘You’re a clever man, Oliver. You know I’ve always thought so. Everything you’ve just said is almost certainly true. But listen to me, my dear; listen to me very
carefully when I say this to you:
‘
It’s got absolutely nothing to do with us
.’
When she woke up next morning, lightheaded and dizzy after her migraine, Diana spent a few muzzy moments wondering if the events of the previous day had been anything more than
an extraordinarily vivid dream. Had it really happened, any of it?
She sat up. The other side of the bed was unslept in; Douglas must have used one of the spare rooms in order not to disturb her.
After a few moments’ thought, she reached down for her handbag at the side of the bed. She fished through a side-pocket, found the piece of paper, and read what was scrawled on it.