She was tingling with excitement.
She couldn’t see James sitting at any of the tables and was beginning to wonder if she was the first to arrive when he suddenly came out of the hotel doorway and stood in the sunshine,
shading his eyes with one hand as he looked around for her. He began turning the wrong way.
‘I’m over here!’ She waved at him.
He spun round and saw her at once. For a moment they stood and smiled at each other, and then he was moving swiftly across the terrace.
She looked quickly around her. She didn’t expect to see anyone she recognised; she’d only been in France for a couple of months. But if somebody she knew did turn up, she’d
think of an excuse of some sort. She was, she reflected, getting rather good at that.
‘Hello, Diana.’
‘Hello, James.’
He bent forward and kissed her lightly on each cheek. ‘Thanks so much for coming.’
‘I had to,’ she told him simply. Impulsively she leaned forward and kissed him quickly on the mouth. ‘Where are we sitting?’
‘Over here. Come on.’ He took her arm and guided her across the terrace. ‘You’ll never guess who’s at the table next to ours.’
They sat down under one of the fig trees.
‘No – who?’
He brushed her hair behind her ear so he could whisper into it. ‘Picasso. Pablo bloody Picasso. Don’t turn round, though, he doesn’t like being stared at. Do it casually later.
There’s plenty of time. He’s only just arrived and he always sits at his table for ages.’
Diana stared at him. ‘What, you mean you’ve seen him here before?’
James nodded. ‘God, yes, I come here all the time. I told you, I have an account. Mind you, at least I pay for my meals with good old-fashioned money – old Pablo just dashes off the
odd painting to settle his summer accounts here. You must have a look around inside later. The walls are covered with art – Picasso, Chagall – all the big names come to this hotel. Some
of them stay for weeks. The Colombe’s private collection must be worth an absolute fortune.’
A dark-haired waiter appeared beside them. ‘
Bonjour, monsieur. Ça va?
’
‘Christien!’ James grinned up at him. He turned to Diana. ‘This is Christien. He always looks after me here. Best damn waiter in Provence, and the best-looking too. Film-star
material, wouldn’t you say?’
Diana looked at the young waiter as he handed them menus. He was certainly handsome enough with his jet-black hair, straightened and gleaming with oil. And he had a lovely smile, she thought, as
they formally shook hands – ‘Christien, Diana; Diana, Christien’ – but his dark brown eyes troubled her. They flickered with anxiety, even as he bowed and smiled.
She remembered the waiter at the Negresco the day before. James seemed to have quite an effect on people here. She’d never noticed it before, back in England. Perhaps the French
didn’t know what to make of a successful, wealthy British man in their midst. Maybe it was something to do with the war; lingering French guilt at being so quickly routed while her ally
struggled on alone.
James had ordered their wine before Diana had arrived and now Christien drew the dripping bottle from a silver bucket at the side of the table, and poured ice-cold Chablis for both of them. Then
he hurried away with their order.
The faint atmosphere of tension lifted as soon as he was gone, and Diana felt herself relax as she eavesdropped on the conversations that ebbed and flowed around her.
James lifted his glass. ‘A toast, Diana, to finding each other again. It’s incredible, isn’t it? A kind of miracle. You thought I was dead and I . . . well, I never dreamed
I’d set eyes on you again. Here’s to us.’
‘To us.’
They touched glasses.
Something’s happening
, thought Diana.
I shouldn’t have come here, but I’m glad I did. I haven’t felt like this for so, so
long
.
She realised he was staring at her. ‘What is it, James?’
‘You look different,’ he told her. ‘From yesterday, I mean.’
‘In what way?’
He shrugged. ‘Happier, I suppose. Definitely more relaxed, but that’s understandable. You must have thought you’d seen a ghost when I got out of that taxi.’
He reached over and took her hand, squeezing it gently. Without thinking, she returned the pressure. ‘Can you ever forgive me, Diana, for running out on you? Tell me that
something
I explained to you yesterday made any kind of sense.’
Diana drank some of her wine as she considered. ‘Well, yes. Yes, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now and I wouldn’t be . . . feeling like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘Happy. Incredibly, unbelievably happy. I woke up this morning feeling like a different woman . . . No, that’s not quite true – I feel like the woman I used to be. I
can’t deny it, James, not to myself nor to you. Being here with you now is just like a miracle, as you said. I feel that a part of me which went to sleep a long time ago is waking up
again.’
He laughed. ‘My very own Sleeping Beauty.’ He gestured at the sun-dappled terrace around them. ‘And here we are, in our own fairy story. Who knows what’s going to happen
to us next?’
Diana couldn’t think quite what to say to that and was grateful for Christien’s reappearance with their starters. They were both having
bouquet de crevettes
and Diana wished
she hadn’t worn her cream lace dress; one false move in dead-heading the juicy prawns that were perched all around the rim of a small cut-glass salad bowl would leave her spotted with
indelible orange stains.
James noticed her hesitation and understood at once. ‘Ah yes, the timeless exploding prawn dilemma. Here – give them to me.’
He drew her starter towards him and deftly removed the heads, tails and scales before washing his fingers in a finger-bowl of lemon-scented water brought by Christien. He pushed the prawns back
to her. ‘There. All done.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and then, barely realising what she was doing, she took his hand in hers and raised it to her lips, kissing his fingertips.
‘Thank you,’ she said again.
He smiled at her. ‘Well, I suppose it’s a start. Preparing your prawns for you, I mean. I have to start making up for the last decade somehow, don’t I?’
They ate in silence for a minute or so before Diana looked at him, and sighed. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to ask you a question. You can probably guess what it is.’
‘Yes, I think I can. You want to know if I’ve found someone else, as you have, and precisely how I make my way here in Nice.’
‘That’s two questions.’
‘True, but you were planning on asking me both of them, weren’t you?’ He paused while Christien took away their dishes. James then poured more wine for them both.
‘Right.’ He looked up at her. ‘Firstly, I am not involved with anyone at the moment. In fact, I haven’t been for some time. Of course I’ve had liaisons over the
years, but nothing ever came of them.’
For a second time he reached for her hand. ‘I admitted yesterday that in the days and weeks after I was shot down I didn’t really think about you much, if at all. I was just too
damned busy staying alive and keeping out of either French or German hands.’
‘I can understand that.’ She squeeed his hand. ‘Really, I can.’
He nodded gratefully. ‘But once I got to Nice and found my feet,’ he went on, ‘I thought about you more and more. I kept wishing that somehow things had turned out differently.
That I’d been shot down over England, for example, and perhaps wounded in a way that stopped me flying again. All hopeless, foolish fantasies; I knew that. But you were always on my
mind.’
‘It was the same for me, James. A day never passed when I didn’t think about you.’
They stared at each other for some time, before he continued: ‘As for how I live, it’s not complicated. Even after I got my false papers in Marseilles, I had a lot of money left
over. Most of the hard cash and all the gold and jewellery. As I told you, there was far more in that man’s safe than he could possibly earn as a country doctor. Did I mention that in the
same bag as the banknotes there were embossed business cards giving his name and the address of another surgery in Paris?’
Diana shook her head.
‘No? Well, I had a lot of ground to cover yesterday, I suppose. Anyway, when I got to Nice I decided to invest in some local businesses. There might have been a war on but as I said,
you’d hardly have known it. I bought stakes in shops, bars, hotels – even a taxi-rank. That cab you saw me getting out of yesterday is one of mine and the guy driving it is basically my
personal chauffeur.
‘Eventually I was able to buy most of my partners out entirely. I did pretty OK during the war, Diana, but now,’ James waved expansively at the packed restaurant around them,
‘the South of France is really booming. I’m making serious money. I deal in antiques. I don’t know how much your Dougal is worth, but—’
‘It’s
Douglas
,’ Diana corrected for the second time. For some reason she wanted to smile.
‘Dammit! Douglas! Sorry, Diana, I’m not doing it on purpose. I was always rotten with names, you remember that . . . Anyway, I was going to say I’d be happy to meet him at any
of the tables in the casino at Monte, win or lose. I’m bankrolled. In fact, I’m putting the money together to close my biggest deal so far, but I won’t bore you with that now. I
don’t want you to think I’m shooting you a line.’
She allowed herself a smile. ‘No, you’re not doing that. I can see you’re a local VIP by the way people treat you. Christien, for example. But he reminds me of the waiter at
the Negresco, James; something tells me he’s frightened of you.’
‘
Frightened
of me?’ James burst out laughing. ‘I just stand out a bit because I’m an Englishman and I don’t talk about my past. Man of mystery,
that’s me. I reckon they’re just curious.’
The brown Citroën pulled away from the villa’s front door and Maxine took the white envelope the taxi driver had handed to her and propped it on the marble
mantelpiece. The fireplace below was laid with logs and kindling, but they were hidden behind a large bowl of flowers that had been placed in front of the grate. The fire would not be lit again
until late October.
‘Come along, Stella!’ she called, her low heels clicking on the stone slabs of the entrance hall. ‘Our lessons are over for today. We are going out.’
A few moments later, the girl appeared at the top of the stairs that led to the villa’s bedrooms.
‘Are we? Who was that at the door?’
‘A letter for your mother. Come down and put your shoes on, I have a treat for you.’ Maxine scooped car keys from a side table and fumbled in her bag for the scrap of paper with the
villa’s burglar-alarm code scrawled on it. She could never remember the random series of numbers and letters.
Stella ran into the room. ‘What about Mummy? Where is she?’
‘She’s having lunch with an old friend she bumped into. She just rang to say she won’t be home for a couple of hours yet.’
‘
Again?
’ Stella looked surprised. ‘But she was out quite late yesterday afternoon, too. She promised she’d take me to the fair at Villeneuve Loubet today. It
just opened for the summer.’
‘I know,’ Maxine said. ‘That’s where I am to take you. We will have fun together, won’t we? And Mummy says maybe she can join us there later. It is not a large fair
and she will find us quite easily, I think.’
Stella was mollified. ‘All right. Let me get my pocket money and put my shoes on, and we can be off.’
Diana shivered under him and James leaned back towards the foot of the bed to pull the sheets up over them both. Then he drew her to him and kissed her forehead.
‘Cold?’
She shivered again, and gave a small laugh. ‘Hardly . . . not after that. It’s just that I – oh my goodness, James!’
He held her tightly until another, exquisite convulsion had passed.
‘Well,’ she said, when she felt she could speak with reasonable composure. ‘That was . . .’ Diana made a small fanning gesture in front of her face as she gazed up at the
ceiling. ‘That was . . . I don’t know . . . exactly like it was, you know, that week at the Dower House.’
He slid one arm under her waist and pulled her gently on her side until they were facing each other.
‘For me, too. You’re lovely, Diana. Lovelier than you ever were. Let me look at you properly.’
He pulled the sheets away again and sat up, gazing at her.
‘You’re perfect . . . unchanged. Except for this.’ He looked at the neat horizontal scar below her navel and stroked it gently with a forefinger. ‘But this makes you more
real, and oh . . . I don’t know, complete.’ He stroked the silver line again. ‘That’s Stella, I suppose?’
‘That’s Stella,’ she confirmed.
She felt completely comfortable under his scrutiny, in a way she never did with Douglas. Dear, kind, generous Douglas. She knew he couldn’t help it, but Douglas always seemed to devour her
with hungry eyes before they made love. And even afterwards, when she slipped out of bed to go to their bathroom, he followed her every movement with a relish she found increasingly difficult to
bear. Soon, she knew she would think it repellent.
They had never once made love in the dark. Douglas always insisted on keeping the light on ‘so I can see you properly’. Surely husbands could desire their wives without being so
openly lecherous? Douglas didn’t make her feel desired; he made her feel gloated over. For some time now she’d increasingly found pretexts to avoid the act of love. She could tell
Douglas had noticed. A certain coolness had begun to form between them.
She had made no such excuses an hour ago to James.
As their lunch progressed she had found herself reaching for his hand more often, and detaining it in her own for longer. She had always loved his hands, from that first night
they slept together in the Dower House, and the shuddering, involuntary responses that they drew from her. And then later, when they made love . . . she trembled slightly at the memory.
And as they talked and laughed about the time they’d spent together all those years ago, she began to understand her hunger to see him today for what it really was.