style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Yes.’
‘My ancestors and I have always preferred blondes.’ His tone left little room for doubt that brunettes were for the plebs only. Reluctantly, he laid down his knife and fork and peered sideways. ‘Passable, passable, I must say.’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper that couldn’t have been heard more than twenty feet away. ‘Your friend, you say. Then who’s that dissipated-looking layabout with her?’
Seated at a table about ten feet away and clearly well within earshot of Le Grand Duc, a man removed his horn-rimmed glasses and folded them with an air of finality: he was conservatively and expensively dressed in grey gaberdine, was tall, broad-shouldered, black-haired and just escaped being handsome because of the slightly battered irregularity of his deeply tanned face. The girl opposite him, tall, dark, smiling and with amusement in her green eyes, put a restraining hand on his wrist.
‘Please, Mr Bowman. It’s not worth it, is it? Really?’
Bowman looked into the smiling face and subsided. ‘I am strongly tempted, Miss Dubois, strongly tempted.’ He reached for his wine but his hand stopped half-way. He heard Lila’s voice, disapproving, defensive.
‘He looks more like a heavy-weight boxer to me.’
Bowman smiled at Cecile Dubois and raised his glass.
‘Indeed.’ Le Grand Duc quaffed another half goblet of rosé. ‘One about twenty years past his prime.’
Wine spilled on the table as Bowman set down his glass with a force that should have shattered the delicate crystal. He rose abruptly to his feet, only to find that Cecile, in addition to all her other obviously fine points, was possessed of a set of excellent reflexes. She was on her feet as quickly as he was, had insinuated herself between Bowman and Le Grand Duc’s table, took his arm and urged him gently but firmly in the direction of the swimming pool: they looked for all the world like a couple who had just finished dinner and decided to go for a stroll for the digestion’s sake. Bowman, though with obvious reluctance, went along with this. He had about him the air of a man for whom the creation of a disturbance with Le Grand Duc would have been a positive pleasure but who drew the line at having street brawls with young ladies.
‘I’m sorry.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘But Lila is my friend. I didn’t want her embarrassed.’
‘Ha! You didn’t want her embarrassed. Doesn’t matter, I suppose, how embarrassed I am?’
‘Oh, come on. Just sticks and stones, you know. You really don’t look the least little bit dissipated to me.’ Bowman stared at her suspiciously, but there was no malicious amusement in her eyes: she was pursing her lips in mock but friendly seriousness. ‘Mind you, I can see that not everyone would like to be called a layabout. By the way, what do you do? Just in case I have to defend you to the Dulce – verbally, that is.’
‘Hell with the Duke.’
‘That’s not an answer to my question.’
‘And a very good question it is too.’ Bowman paused reflectively, took off his glasses and polished them. ‘Fact is, I don’t do anything.’
They were now at the farther end of the pool. Cecile took her hand away from his arm and looked at him without any marked enthusiasm.
‘DO you mean to tell me, Mr Bowman –’
‘Call me Neil. All my friends do.’
‘You make friends very easily, don’t you?’ she asked with inconsequential illogic.
‘I’m like that,’ Bowman said simply.
She wasn’t listening or, if she was, she ignored him. ‘Do you mean to tell me you never work? You never do anything!’
‘Never.’
‘You’ve no job?’ You’ve been trained for nothing? You can’t do anything?’
‘Why should I spin and toil?’ Bowman said reasonably. ‘My old man’s made millions. Still making them, come to that. Every other generation should take it easy, don’t you think – a sort of recharging of the family batteries. Besides, I don’t need a job. Far be it from me,’ he finished piously, ‘to deprive some poor fellow who really needs it.’
‘Of all the specious arguments … How could I have misjudged a man like that?’
‘People are always misjudging me,’ Bowman said sadly.
‘Not you. The Duke. His perception.’ She shook her head, but in a way that looked curiously more like an exasperated affection than cold condemnation. ‘You really are an idle layabout, Mr Bowman.’
‘Neil.’
‘Oh, you’re incorrigible.’ For the first time, irritation.
‘And envious.’ Bowman took her arm as they approached the patio again and because he wasn’t smiling she made no attempt to remove it. ‘Envious of you. Your spirit, I mean. Your yearlong economy and thrift. For you two English girls to be able to struggle by here at £200 a week each on your typists’ salaries or whatever –’
‘Lila Delafont and I are down here to gather material for a book.’ She tried to be stiff but it didn’t become her.
‘On what?’ Bowman asked politely. ‘Provençal cookery? Publishers don’t pay that kind of speculative advance money. So who picks up the tab? Unesco? The British Council?’ Bowman peered at her closely through his horn-rimmed glasses but clearly she wasn’t the lip-biting kind. ‘Let’s all pay a silent tribute to good old Daddy, shall we? A truce, my dear. This is too good to spoil. Beautiful night, beautiful food, beautiful girl.’ Bowman adjusted his spectacles and surveyed the patio. ‘Your girl-friend’s not bad either. Who’s the slim Jim with her?’
She didn’t answer at once, probably because she was momentarily hypnotized by the spectacle of Le Grand Duc holding an enormous balloon glass of rosé in one hand while with the other he directed the activities of a waiter who appeared to be transferring the contents of the dessert trolley on to the plate before him. Lila Delafont’s mouth had fallen slightly open.
‘I don’t know. He says he’s a friend of her father.’ She looked away with some difficulty, saw and beckoned the passing restaurant manager. ‘Who’s the gentleman with my friend?’
The Duc de Croytor, madam. A very famous winegrower.’
‘A very famous wine-drinker, more like.’ Bowman ignored Cecile’s disapproving look. ‘Does he come here often?’
‘For the past three years at this time.’
‘The food is especially good at this time!’
‘The food, sir, is superb here at any time.’ The Baumaniere’s manager wasn’t amused. ‘Monsieur le Duc comes for the annual gypsy festival at Saintes-Maries.’
Bowman peered at the Duc de Croytor again. He was spooning down his dessert with a relish matched only by his speed of operation.
‘You can see why he has to have an ice-bucket,’ Bowman observed. ‘To cool
