This was ridiculous.
She felt uncomfortable under his stare, but at the same time there was something about him that made her want to go on talking to him. It was as if he was familiar in some way that she couldn’t quite identify.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Not a broken heart, exactly. More a sad, wasteful mess that I’m ashamed of. He – somebody else – got more hurt than me. I wish it had been the other way round.’
‘Yes,’ he said drily. ‘One always does. So, what now?’
‘Oh, becoming the greatest wine writer in the world.’
‘Of course. Impossible for me to stand in the way of that. We shall have to cook up something between us that will satisfy your editor.’
Charles glanced down at his watch and frowned.
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to sit here with you like this all evening.’
That was conventional French politesse, but Bell caught herself hoping that there was a whisper of truth in it.
‘But I think I should take you to meet my mother. She will be waiting for us. She always sits in the salon before dinner.’
Charles drained his champagne glass and picked up the half-empty bottle. Bell stood up too, and then glanced down at her bare, suntanned legs.
‘Perhaps I should change?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. There will be just the three of us. My sister Juliette is away until tomorrow.’
He was holding the door open, looking a little impatient. Bell followed him obediently.
Across the hallway a pair of panelled doors opened into a long, graceful drawing-room.
It struck Bell as exquisitely French and at the same time very feminine. The spindly chairs and chaises longues were gilt and upholstered in faded, rose-coloured silks. Panelled walls were painted the palest duck-egg blue and hung with gilt-framed landscapes and clusters of miniatures.
Charles’s mother was sitting to one side of a creamy marble fireplace, leaning over an embroidery frame. As they came in her eyes went straight to the champagne bottle in Charles’s hand.
‘Charles,’ she said in a high, clear patrician voice, ‘couldn’t you have found a tray and a napkin?’ Bell thought that he stiffened as he set the bottle carefully down on an inlaid table.
‘Mama,’ he said, ‘this is Bell Farrer. Bell, my mother – Hélène de Gillesmont.’ Mother and son were very alike, except that the baroness’s face was more deeply etched with lines of pride and hauteur.
Her cold eyes travelled over Bell’s plain blue linen shirt and very slightly creased skirt, and the pale eyebrows arched upwards a fraction. Bell’s hostess was wearing a pale grey silk dinner dress with couture written all over it and a triple rope of pearls.
She held out a reluctant hand. There was a huge emerald in the ring on her third finger.
‘How do you do, Miss er … Won’t you sit down, and my son will pour you another drink?’ She spoke English, perfectly, sounding like the Queen.
Bell perched on the nearest fragile little chair and sighed inwardly. Black mark to the grubby English journalist. She guessed that she was going to have to work very hard indeed to keep her end up this evening. Perhaps it would help if she showed off her own almost equally perfect French.
‘What a beautiful room this is. It feels so restful.’
Back came the reply, still in English.
‘Yes. My daughter-in-law and I planned it together.’ It was a deliberate snub, and Bell felt a flash of irritation. She looked at Charles but his face was turned away from both of them as he stared out of the window.
It was going to be a difficult evening.
It felt to Bell like about five hours later when they filed back into Hélène’s salon for coffee.
The meal had inched past punctuated with long frozen silences. The food had been simple and perfect – spinach soufflé, chicken, fresh fruit – but Bell had eaten her way cheerlessly through it without tasting a mouthful. All she remembered was the fine Château Carbonnieux in her glass. The only time Charles had looked directly at her was when she tasted it, and she had signalled her approval with an infinitesimal nod. Hélène, she was sure, would have condemned it as appallingly vulgar to discuss either the wine or the food. Now they were sitting in the salon again, drinking strong black coffee from tiny gold cups.
Bell wondered a little desperately how soon she could plead tiredness after her flight and escape to bed.
‘Your room is quite comfortable, Miss er?’
‘Bell Farrer,’ said Bell, deliberately stressing the syllables. ‘Yes, thank you, quite comfortable. Is that beautiful bathroom new?’
‘Catherine, my daughter-in-law, designed it.’ Hélène was looking sideways, towards her work-table, and Bell followed her gaze. There was a photograph in a silver art nouveau frame, carefully angled to catch the light from a rose-shaded lamp. Under a smooth cap of dark hair the girl’s face was pale and grave. She was looking down, so that her eyes were hidden by a sweep of dark lashes, but there was a determined point to her chin. Clasped around her long, fragile neck was what looked like a collar of diamonds.
Catherine. Charles’s wife, thought Bell, fascinated. She looked delicate but very beautiful. Bell glanced quickly across at Charles. All evening he had sat unsmilingly at the table between his mother and his guest. He had led the stilted conversation with polished politeness, but he had gone back to being the formal stranger she had met on the steps outside.
The strange moment of intimacy might never have happened.
Now Bell thought that an atmosphere of uneasy tension was creeping into the frigidity of the evening. Charles was sitting tautly in a small armchair, squeezing his little gold cup as if he wanted to crush it into fragments.
Hélène had picked up her petit point and she was stitching with studied calmness. She was still talking in her high, grand voice.
‘We plan to put in new bathrooms throughout the house. It’s surprising how Catherine’s ideas have always coincided with mine.’ She gave a tiny resigned sigh. ‘Unlike Juliette and me. My own daughter is a mystery to me nowadays.’ Bell was still watching Charles, noticing how the tiny blond hairs on his cheekbone glinted in the pinkish light when he clenched his jaw muscles. Moving very slowly, as if he found it an effort to control his movements, he leant forward and put his cup back on the tray.
Bell sensed that something in him was vibrating, ready to snap.
‘As soon as Catherine returns from Paris.’ Hélène’s voice rippled on and Bell listened in puzzlement.
Charles had said that they were separated. Weren’t they, after all?
‘She has been ill. She needed a long rest, and a complete change, but now she is well enough she will be coming home. Then we …’
With a sudden movement, as lithe as a cat, Charles was
