Nevertheless, her eyes were instinctively drawn to it each time she came to the restaurant, and she invariably lingered for an extra moment at the desk to study it.
Now, on a sudden, inexplicable impulse, she said, ‘Is it for sale?’
He looked remorseful. ‘I regret—it has already gone. But he has other, very different work for which he wishes to find a market, and I have been able to send interested buyers to him. Also he accepts commissions.’
He paused. ‘But what he needs, signorina, is a patron—someone with contacts in the art world—an exhibition in a gallery to make him known.’
He delved under the desk and handed her a cheaply printed business card. It carried the single word ‘Roan’, and a mobile telephone number.
She studied it, wondering whether Roan was a given name or a surname. ‘Pretty basic.’
‘It is not easy when you are at the beginning of your career.’
‘I suppose not.’ She slipped the card into a side pocket of her bag, intending to dispose of it later. Asking about the picture had been a pure whim, coming at her from nowhere, and best forgotten.
Besides, right now she had her own struggles to contend with, she thought as she walked out into the sunlit street. And this state of deadlock with her grandfather was set fair and square centre-stage.
Harriet smothered a sigh as she began to walk briskly back to her office. She loved Grandfather—of course she did—and she owed him a hell of a lot, but she was under no illusions about him either.
Gregory Flint was a total flesh-eating, swamp-bound dinosaur. Tyrannosaurus Rex, alive and in person. He always had been, and he certainly saw no reason to change—not at his time of life, nor in his current state of health.
And, however preposterous his demands, it was unwise to shrug them off and hope he would forget, as she was now discovering to her cost.
She could only imagine the scene when her mother, eighteen and unwed, had defiantly announced that she was pregnant, that marriage to the father was out of the question, and that she would never agree to a termination. Could imagine too that the subsequent explosion would have rocked the Richter scale.
Certainly the news had created a breach that had caused Caroline Flint to be barred from the family home, especially when she’d refused to atone for her sins by giving the baby up for adoption. And it had been six years before contact was resumed.
‘Your grandfather wants to see you, darling,’ her mother had announced lightly one day. ‘Which means that the prodigal daughter is being given a second chance too. Wonders will never cease.’
Her partner at the time, an unemployed session guitarist called Bryn, had glanced up at her. ‘Don’t knock it, Princess. We could use a fatted calf.’
They went down to Gracemead the following day, and as the station taxi turned the corner in the drive, and the house lay in front of them, Harriet drew a breath of stunned, incredulous joy. Because it didn’t seem possible after the cheap flats she was used to that she could be even marginally connected with such a truly magical place.
In time, she’d come to see that Gracemead was not really beautiful. That her Flint ancestor, the wealthy Victorian merchant who’d taken a classic Georgian house and embellished it with a Gothic façade, before adding turrets at each end in imitation of his sovereign’s Scottish retreat at Balmoral, had actually been something of a vandal.
But, seeing it that first time as a confused and not always happy child, she gasped in wonder as the afternoon sun touched the windows, and flecked the stones with gold, telling herself it was a fairy palace, and that her mother must genuinely be the Princess that Bryn called her to have been born there.
The interview between Gregory Flint and his errant daughter was conducted in private. Harriet was whisked off to the kitchen by a plump, elderly woman who’d been Caroline’s old nanny, and plied with milk and small iced cakes with smiley faces that had been piped on to them by Mrs Wade, the cook-housekeeper.
When she eventually joined them, her mother was smiling too, but with a kind of rigid determination, and her eyes were red.
‘Such fun, sweetie. You’re going to stay here with Grandpa and have a wonderful time. Spoiled to death, I expect, don’t you, Nanny?’
‘Aren’t you staying too?’ Harriet asked in bewilderment, but Caroline shook her head.
‘I’ll be going with Bryn, darling. He has a marvellous tour of America coming up with a very famous singer. We’ll be away for ages, so it’s best that you’re here. It’s a wonderful place to grow up in,’ she added, the lovely face momentarily shadowed with something like regret.
And so it had proved, thought Harriet. Because she’d never actually lived with her mother again after that, seeing her only from time to time as someone whose visits became less and less frequent.
The house had become the constant in her life—had become her home. And that initial sense of wonder—almost of recognition—had never faded. She’d felt from the start that the place was reaching out to her to hug her—to soothe away any sense of abandonment she might feel. And she’d hugged it back, knowing that it was where she truly belonged.
Accustomed to London’s restrictions, she’d found Gracemead and its large grounds had provided her with a magical playground to explore for hours at a time. And Nanny and Mrs Wade had almost vied with each other to make sure she lacked for nothing to make her feel comfortable and secure.
Her relationship with her grandfather had taken rather longer to establish. He’d been awkward with her at first, taciturn and more than a little gruff. And sometimes she’d found him watching her as if he was puzzled about something. Then, one day, she’d heard one of the local ladies refer to her as ‘Poor Caroline’s little girl. You would never know, would you?’ and understood.
It was the day he’d found her in his book-lined study, deep in Black Beauty, twining a strand of hair round her finger as she read, that everything had changed between them.
She hadn’t realised immediately that she was no longer alone, and when she’d looked up and seen him watching her, she’d been apprehensive in case he was angry.
But his sudden smile had been strangely tender. ‘Your mother used to do that when she was reading,’ he told her. ‘And this was her favourite book too.’
He sat down in the big wing chair by the fireplace and began to talk to her, listening patiently to her halting replies, and encouraging her to be less shy, and say whatever was on her mind.
Looking back, Harriet could even say with honesty that she’d had a pretty good childhood in spite of her mother’s continuing and prolonged absences. There’d been postcards at first, and letters from the States, then from Europe, after the relationship with Bryn had finally crashed and burned like all the others, and Caroline had joined up with a professional tennis player, not quite in the top rank.
Eventually, as the years had passed, the letters had become fewer, then dried up altogether. At the last contact—a card for her twenty-first birthday—Caroline had seemed to be in Argentina living with a former polo player. But no address had been included, and since then there’d been nothing to indicate whether her mother was alive or dead.
