Jane even looked a little older when they left England.
The other observer of the way a man looked when he was rather more than interested in a particular young woman was Etienne; but as a result he didn’t, like Sandra, receive any new ideas. He merely looked away and temporarily dazzled his partner by smiling right into her eyes. It was the young woman in the white chiffon, and for a second or so she was almost noticeably overcome.
Later that night Jane said good-bye to her hostess. Elspeth de Rambouillet held her hand rather closely and looked at her regretfully. Jane didn’t know that she had a particular reason for feeling an immense amount of regret.
“I hope that one day you will come back to our corner of France,” she said. Suddenly an idea seized her. “Come and stay with us if you ever feel you would like to do so. Armand and I would be happy to have you.”
“You are very kind,” Jane said, but inwardly she knew that this was farewell ... She was quite certain that this was a permanent farewell. For she would never dare to come back to this leafy corner of France. For her it would have too many memories that might take years to smother in any case.
The next morning she wakened with a blinding migraine headache that upset all her plans for the day. She did sometimes suffer from these headaches, but almost always only when she was mentally perturbed about something. The instant she lifted her head from her pillow she knew this was going to be a day difficult to get through, and in addition to the final packing she had planned to steal away for an hour, if it could be managed, and pay a last visit to Adele for the purpose of the good-bye she had promised her.
But Fate willed otherwise, and when she staggered from her bed she looked so white and ill that Sandra, as soon as she saw her, ordered her back to bed.
“If there’s any more packing to be done I’ll see to it,” she said. “Between us, Clarri and I can clear everything up, and you’re not to bother. You poor poppet!” She looked at Jane with honest sympathy. “If I felt like you look I know I’d be feeling awful. And that isn’t intended to depress you, because I don’t suppose you’re bothering about looks right now. Stay where you are, at least until later in the day.”
Jane insisted she was much better after tea, and she dragged herself downstairs after a bath and a careful face-do, and joined the others in the big salon just before dinner. Mark Lanyard was almost tenderly sympathetic, and put a drink into her hand he declared would do her a great deal of good, and from the open french windows Etienne merely looked at her.
He had sent a note earlier in the day. It had said:
If you are not well you must let me get a doctor for you.
But she had not replied.
Now she was aware of his eyes, dark and deep, and searching, in an unusually pale, and rather grim, face, for him. But he didn’t move over to her, and he said nothing at all to her until later that night, when he caught her, too, standing in the opening of the french window, and looking out into the night.
“Jane!” His voice sounded urgent. “Do you think you’ll be fit enough to travel tomorrow!”
He himself was driving her and Sandra in his black car, and this time it was Mark who was entrusted with the Cadillac.
Jane looked round at him slowly. Her face had a pearly pallor that made her look slightly ethereal, and her little black dinner-dress completed the illusion. Her eyes, however, were quite unreadable.
“Oh, yes, of course. I’ll be perfectly all right.”
“We could postpone leaving here for another day, if you’d rather. I’m sure Sandra wouldn’t raise any objections.”
“I wouldn’t dream of causing you all so much inconvenience.”
She saw him bite hard at his lower lip, and he threw away the cigarette he had only just lit, and somewhat jerkily went through the motions of lighting another. His face was paler than it had been before dinner, and it showed up his black brows, and the almost blue-blackness of his hair.
Away down at the far end of the room Sandra and Mark were comfortably ensconced on a settee, and from the placid contentment of their expressions they might have been discussing marriage plans. Madame Heloise was putting infinitely tiny stitches into a piece of needlework, and Val Wade was asleep.
Etienne studied the tip of his cigarette when it was alight, and then spoke quickly.
“I saw Adele today. She told me she was hoping to see you - to say good-bye! I explained that you were not able to visit her, and ... she asked me to say au revoir to you!”
“It will not be au revoir,” Jane answered. “But she is only a child. She wouldn’t know.”
“Perhaps - in England - you will see her again.”
‘That is, of course, possible,” she admitted. “If you are going to send her to England.”
“I am endeavouring to arrange to send her to England quite soon, but I don’t suppose it will be before Christmas. No doubt they will accept her for the spring term.”
‘That will be a very good time for her to start something so new and fresh as school life,” Jane said.
“And you will - visit her sometimes?”
“I’ll do that gladly if you’d like me to. But I may not be in England for some time yet. Sandra is expecting me to go to America with her, and I don’t know when I’ll get back from America, do I?”
“No.” He was staring up at the stars, so many millions of miles away above their heads. “Perhaps you will never return from America.”
“Perhaps not.”
“On the other hand, you may go to Rome. You may settle eventually in Rome!”
“Perhaps,” she said again, as if she was an automaton. “In life it is all perhaps, and perhaps, and perhaps ... The only certain thing is that I will not come back to France!”
This time it was he who turned away. He just left her side and walked out into the night.
CHAPTER XIV
To enjoy Paris one has to be in the mood, or so Jane decided. And she was not in the mood to enjoy very much.
But, nevertheless, Paris has something which no other city has, and she couldn’t let it pass her by altogether. If it had been spring-time she might have felt just a little lighter-hearted when she was installed in the big luxury hotel where Sandra had booked a suite for them; but autumn is always a time for regrets, and the day closed in at such an early hour, and the lights went up so early. Once or twice when she walked in the Bois there was a thin, mizzling rain, and the leaves beneath her feet felt curiously sodden, and the huge luxurious cars as they flashed past spattered her with mire.
Not that Sandra left her very much time for walking alone in the Bois, and Michael Pennington, when he followed hard on their heels, left her with even less.
Sandra had a head full of ideas about shopping, and principally she was concerned with shopping for a trousseau. Now that she had definitely made up her mind to marry Mark in the spring - although so far there had been no official announcement - she wanted to start preparing for the event in earnest. And there was no certainty she would ever be in Paris again, and Pairs dress designers and couturiers and so forth must be taken full advantage of while she had an opportunity to do so.
Jane found herself spending hours at a time in exclusive little establishments on the Rue de la Paix, and the Place Vendome, She got to know the Rue de Rivoli, with its fascinating shops designed to separate tourists from a great deal of their currency, so well that she felt she would be able to pay a visit to it blindfold if she stayed in Paris for another week. She sat inside one of the most sumptuously appointed hairdressing-salons in all Paris and waited for Sandra to emerge even more beautiful than when she went in; and although she felt no urge to submit to the same treatment herself, strove to appear grateful when her employer insisted on footing the bill for re-styling of her own short chestnut hair.
That was the day Michael Pennington appeared unexpectedly for lunch, and Sandra pressed him to remain throughout the entire afternoon, and afterwards consented to allow him to take them all out to d
inner. The restaurant he chose was not, as Jane might have supposed - since she imagined all artists adhered, as if it was a matter of principle, to the Left Bank - in the Montparnasse area, but once again one of Paris’s most fashionable; and it was perched high above the Seine, with the lights of all Paris floating in the water - or so it seemed - and a view of Notre Dame from the window beside which Jane sat.
The next morning Michael Pennington was at the hotel almost before Jane had finished her breakfast coffee and rolls, and when she joined him in one of the main lounges he told her eagerly that Sandra had given permission the night before for him to take her secretary out for the whole of the day. It was going to be one of those glorious days left over by the sheer magnanimity of summer, and in Paris it would be a sin to waste it. He proposed paying a visit to the Luxembourg Gardens, and strolling there in the sunshine; and afterwards they might visit the Quai Voltaire, and the Rue des Saints-Peres, and have a look at art and antique shops. And then he knew exactly the right place where they could have lunch, without missing any of the sunshine; and later still there was Sacre Coeur, to the Madeleine, or Notre Dame, whichever she preferred. And if she still felt she could put up with him in the evening he had tickets for a theatre.
Jane couldn’t help but feel slightly flattered to think he wanted to pass so much of his time in her company; and he had shaved off his beard and looked about ten years younger, and extremely distinguished, she also found it possible to look forward to the day he had outlined with a reasonable amount of muted pleasure. It would prevent her having very much thought for anything, or anyone else, anyway, and she excused herself in order to put on something more suitable for long hours of sight-seeing, and when she rejoined him the look in his eyes told her that what she had changed into was just right in his opinion.
His flatteries, she felt, were perfectly sincere, and therefore they were not flatteries. And when he reminded her that he had told her on the first day they met that he wanted to paint her, she knew that he had never put the idea out of his head, and that even that had not been said to flatter her. It was his intention, unless everything went against him, to paint her one day, and it was also his intention to see a lot of her in the future. This trip to Paris was just a preliminary ... He intended it to lead to other things.
Just as she had known that Etienne would never be serious, and that the last thing he desired was a wife, so now she knew that Michael Pennington wanted not merely a wife, but that he wanted her for a wife. A wife who would live with him in Rome, and share his life, and travel the world with him!
It was a thought that might have been attractive, if only she had found him personally attractive. But there was only one man who could be physically attractive to her, and his car swept past outside the hotel just as they stepped into a taxi. Jane didn’t see it, but she was trying hard not to think of him - not to permit him to spoil this one day which might be carefree for her - and at the same time she was a little troubled because perhaps she ought to make it quite clear to Michael Pennington that any dreams he was building up were almost doomed to come tumbling about his ears.
And she knew what it was like to face the thought of an empty future ... Not that it would ever be quite like that for a man. A man who had his work, and would always have the consolation of success in his work.
At the end of their long day together her conscience wasn’t troubling her so much, because it had been such an easy, comradely day, and she felt no qualms about agreeing to repeat it, if Sandra was agreeable. Sandra was perfectly agreeable to letting her have the whole of the next morning, as well as the afternoon - she had decided that they would have to stay on a little longer than a week, because some of the clothes she was having made for her wouldn’t be ready to carry away with them if they stuck to their original programme - but that evening she was giving a dinner-party that was intended as a mark of appreciation of the hospitality her recent host had shown to her, and she expected Jane to support her. Michael was invited to the dinner party, and Sandra said that if he and Jane wished to disappear later on they could do so.
Jane was so certain that once she had come face to face with Etienne again - particularly after not seeing him at all for several days - she would wish to disappear with no one (only, perhaps, into the sanctuary of her own room, where she could lock the door!) that she didn’t even pretend to recognize the coy meaning in Sandra’s eyes. But she knew that the meaning was there, and that Sandra had taken to scheming. That was why she was giving her such a lot of time to herself.
The hour before the guests arrived Jane felt as if nothing inside her was perfectly steady. Her whole inner being seemed to tremble with a desire to see Etienne, and yet her common sense told her the evening was likely to prove a kind of long-drawn-out agony for her. There would be other women present - lovely, smart Parisiennes - and Etienne would already have become a kind of stranger to her. He might barely notice her.
There was no reason why he should notice her. On arrival in Paris he had already assumed a kind of cool, aloof mask, and no doubt the mask was still in position. He would be careful to keep it in position now that they were to part for good so soon.
But, nevertheless, as she assisted Sandra to zip up the back of her magnificent new golden lame gown, and assured her that her make-up was perfect, that wild trembling was still going on inside her, and she felt cold and sick when the moment arrived for them to descend to the ground floor of the hotel.
She herself was wearing her apricot-tinted dress, and she didn’t expect any eyes - except, perhaps, Michael Pennington’s - to brighten when she put in an appearance. Sandra had the eyes of everyone in the flower- massed public rooms turning after her as she swept through them in search of her guests, when at last she found them Etienne was entertaining a glorious redhead - whom Jane later found out was a star of the Paris Opera - and a positive bevy of other people were all laughing and chattering around them.
Etienne was wearing white tie and tails, and it was the first time Jane had seen him looking so supremely elegant. She had always thought he had an unusual elegance, but tonight it was the most arresting thing about him. If his Basque mother, who had once attended to her domestic chores in a stone-floored combined kitchen-and-living-room somewhere up in the High Pyrenees, had failed to recognize him as her own flesh and blood tonight, she could have been easily forgiven.
The opera singer was hanging on to his arm with both of her white-gloved hands, and since she had a pair of magnificent eyes, and was recounting something humorous that had happened to her while he was incarcerated in the country, there was every excuse for him bending slightly above her to watch the expressions that came and went in those same expressive eyes. Sandra’s arrival caused a breaking up of the party, and Etienne transferred his allegiance to her. The opera singer didn’t look too pleased, and Jane noticed that her smiles for her hostess were just a little brittle. It was not until she realized that Sandra was much more interested in Mark Lanyard - and, indeed, she permitted him to announce their engagement at that party - that she began to relax, and her smiles lost that brittle quality.
Jane received a slight, formal bow from Etienne. She knew it was not the custom for a Frenchman to salute an unmarried girl’s hand by carrying it up to his lips, but nevertheless he did kiss Sandra’s hand - perhaps because she was so nearly a matron. Jane’s, he didn’t even offer to touch.
All Jane’s uneasy forebodings about the evening were realized as it slipped away. For Etienne she had ceased to exist. All through dinner, with its numberless courses - or so they seemed to Jane, who had absolutely no appetite - and the descent of a flock of waiters upon their flower-decked oval table near the centre of the great dining-room, he never once lifted his eyes to her face, or transferred them from another face to hers. If it hadn’t been for Michael she would have felt completely out of it, for as a mere secretary she hardly ranked as of much importance amongst the rest of the guests, and all the women had eyes for Etienne. The men wer
e sleek Parisians, whose big cars waited without and who knew the difference between a Dior dress and a filmy confection in apricot tulle, that was the best Jane could afford.
Long before the evening was over she was almost begging Michael to take her away from it.
They all went on to a night-club after dinner, and from there it was an easy matter to slip away while a cabaret turn was in progress, and the lights were all dimmed while the floor show had the benefit of spotlights.
Michael certainly knew his Paris very thoroughly, and he took Jane to a whole series of interesting little night-spots that were reasonably respectable, and where she watched Apache dancing, and didn’t admit that she was repelled by it, and sipped champagne. She was glad that Michael wasn’t the type to try and persuade her to drink more champagne than she knew she wanted, but the little she did drink did seem to give life a less disastrous outlook.
She danced with Michael, and they discussed all sorts of things that had nothing to do with either Apache dancing or night-clubs, and she felt a growing regret because she hadn’t met him before she met Etienne. Or, even if she had met Etienne afterwards, would it have made any difference? she wondered.
They dismissed a taxi on the way back to the hotel at last, and decided to walk through the warm, pleasant, almost summerlike night to the bright lights where they would have to part. Michael was staying at a rather more modest hotel, but that, she gathered, was because he preferred it. The scintillating atmosphere in which Sandra moved would have bored him very quickly.
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