child. Why, he’s little better than a nomad. He’s never had a settled job or a respectable home in his life.’
She could not hear her mother’s soft-voiced reply, but Marty heard Aunt Mary’s scandalised snort in response.
‘You can’t be serious, Tina! Isn’t one mistake enough for you? A man like that—and he must be at least twenty years older than you. Have some sense before it’s too late!’
Years later, Marty could still remember her mother’s laugh, warm and almost carefree, with another underlying note that she was too young to understand then. Yet only a few weeks later, a neighbour had come to fetch her from school, telling her soothingly that her mummy didn’t feel too grand, and before twenty-four hours had passed Tina Langton had died in hospital.
Marty’s eyes misted suddenly as she sank down on one of the wrought iron chairs set outside the café under a striped awning. Uncle Jim had been off on his travels again, so there had been no way to tell him her mother had died—not that Aunt Mary would probably have done so even if there had been a forwarding address, she thought. So he had missed the funeral, and she had travelled south with Aunt Mary, thin-lipped and brooding beside her at this unexpected turn in her affairs.
At first the bewildered child she had been had thought she would never see Uncle Jim again, but she had been wrong, because he had turned up about six months later—‘like the proverbial bad penny’, Aunt Mary had remarked caustically, but she had not prevented Marty from seeing him, either then or on the few subsequent visits, and Marty supposed she should be grateful to her for that.
She had been nine the last time he came, she remembered, and breaking her heart because she had been asked to take part in a play at school and Aunt Mary had refused point blank to make her the necessary costume. He had noticed her red eyes and subdued manner at once and taken her on to his knee while Aunt Mary, rigid with resentment, had gone to the kitchen to make the pot of tea she considered sufficient to fulfil the laws of hospitality.
‘What is it, lass?’ He had smoothed her thick bob of chestnut hair with a massive but infinitely gentle hand. ‘Aren’t you happy here? It’s a grand house, and I’m sure your aunt does her best for you.’
‘I don’t want her best.’ Marty had wound her arms round his neck. ‘I want you, Uncle Jim.’
He was very silent for a long time, then he said quietly, ‘So be it, Tina. I can’t take you with me now, because I don’t know where I’m bound for and that’s no life for a child. But one day, my chick, I’ll find a place to settle down in and then I’ll send for you—just as I’d meant . . .’ He’d stopped then, but Marty had known with an odd instinct that he’d been going to say, ‘just as I’d meant to send for your mother’, and she thought rather sadly that maybe if he’d just taken her with him four years earlier, her mother might still be alive and happy. And it didn’t matter that he’d called her Tina either, because she knew that in some strange way in Uncle Jim’s eyes, she and her mother were the same person.
He’d gone then, after drinking his tea and wishing Miss Barton ‘Good afternoon’ with more civility than sincerity, and Marty had not seen him again. Occasionally there had been a letter, and even more rarely a parcel, but none of them ever contained the hoped-for summons, and after a while the demands of school had begun to blur his image in her mind, and when she thought of him at all it was in the terms of a childhood fantasy.
A young woman emerged from the café to take her order and Marty asked her for an Orangina. Her throat was parched from the dust and heat of travelling. She was hungry too, and when she glanced through the beaded curtain that hung over the open doorway she saw that the adjoining room to the bar was a restaurant, and that there were menus posted on a small board at the side. She felt in her handbag for her wallet and counted her remaining francs. She had enough for a meal, if it wasn’t too expensive, and then she would set about finding her way to Uncle Jim’s house. Les Sables des Pins didn’t look a very big town, and she was sure she would have little difficulty in finding her way to Solitaire, as he’d told her it was called.
She got out his creased and much folded letter and read it again. It was not the letter of a man who had ever had much to do with words, but it was hardly the illiterate scrawl that Aunt Mary had derisively dismissed it as.
It had not been a long letter either, but it told Marty all that was necessary.
‘After all these years,’ he’d written. ‘I’ve finally found a place I can call home, and it’s yours too, Tina, if you still want it. I’ve no relative other than you in the world, so everything I have—the flower farm and the house—will be yours when I’ve gone. It’s very beautiful here in the spring, Tina, when the bulbs have bloomed, and each year in April there’s a flower festival in Les Sables des Pins. That’s the nearest town, and it’s just as it sounds with acres of pine forests running down to the longest beach you’ve ever seen. My house is by itself in the forest—I suppose that’s why the chap that built it called it Solitaire. A bit of a fancy name, but I like it, and I hope that you will too.’
He had enclosed a small coloured snapshot of the house, and as Marty studied it she felt her spirits rise perceptibly. Who couldn’t be cheered by the prospect of going to live in a long, low house, its red-tiled roof, and dark green shutters providing a dramatic contrast to the stark white of the exterior?
There was a man standing near the front door and at first glance she had assumed it was Uncle Jim, but when she looked more closely she saw that he was a much younger man, taller than Uncle Jim, and with dark almost black hair where Jim’s was fair turning to grey. Or had been when she saw him last. He was probably completely grey by now.
She’d looked through the letter, stirred by a vague inexplicable curiosity about the man in the photograph, but there had been no clue to his identity.
Marty drank her Orangina gratefully when it came, and then bestirred herself to look at the menu. As usual there was a choice of meals at various prices, and after some wistful lingering over the menus that offered grilled shrimps and moules marinières as starters, she decided to settle for the plat du jour—a thick slice of rare roast beef, accompanied by a steaming dish of pommes frites, and preceded by a delicious home-made terrine with a side-dish of tomato salad in an aromatic dressing.
In spite of some inner qualms of nervousness at the prospect of meeting Uncle Jim again after all these years her healthy young appetite would not be denied, and she sat back at last with a sigh of repletion, blinking her eyes sleepily in the sun as she drank her coffee and toyed with one of the nectarines that had been served as a dessert.
If the worst came to the worst, she told herself, and Uncle Jim had not received her letter in reply, telling him that she was on her way, or even if he was away, she had enough money to supply her with a night’s lodging here in Les Sables, or even two nights if it came to the pinch. There had been a generous amount of francs enclosed in Uncle Jim’s letter, and she had converted her own small savings into travellers cheques as well.
It was probably this more than anything, she thought, that had convinced Aunt Mary that she was really going to France.
‘You’ve closed your savings account?’ Her aunt had stared at her as if she had gone mad. ‘What on earth has possessed you, child? You surely haven’t been taken in by the boasts of that ridiculous old vagabond? You’ve no idea what kind of conditions he may be living in. He probably wants an unpaid housekeeper to look after him. A Frenchwoman would drive too hard a bargain for him, so he’s thought of you, after all these years without a word.’
Marty bit her lip, willing herself to be silent, while
