by Susan Barrie
She saw a young man in his late twenties, or possibly; early thirties, with well-brushed brown hair and a jacket that had leather protectors on the cuffs and the elbows. It looked like a rather shabby jacket, and his corduroy trousers were definitely shabby, and he, too, could never be mistaken for anything other than what he was.
He looked as if he had put in a year or two at one of the universities and was very studious and probably fond of poetry. But it would be modem poetry, she decided. He would have little in common with either Keats or Browning.
“The name is Peter Fairfield,” he told her, his eyes revealing the admiration she filled him with. “I’ve been discovering Paris for about six months now, but I’ve never seen you before. Why? Is the answer that you’re new to Paris?”
She shook her head, so that the golden cloak of hair fascinated him with its rich rippling movement as it swung against her neck.
“I’ve been here three months, and my name is Valentine Brooke. I don’t make a habit of having lunch at little places like this, so perhaps that’s why you’ve never seen me. Although Paris is hardly suburban, is it?” she said with the dimple appearing at the corner of her mouth.
He agreed with her. He also ordered precisely the same as she had ordered and insisted that she share a bottle of wine with him. He thrust the bottle of vin ordinaire aside and called for the wine list, and the waiter handed it over with a wealth of understanding in his heart. This was the way young people should meet, particularly when they spoke the same language and had looked a little lonely before coming into contact with one another! The girl hadn’t merely looked lonely, she had looked as if she wasn’t quite certain she was a part of this world—or rather, that the world that surrounded her was her world. She had been fighting against some sort of abstraction that had her in its grip, and there had been a hint of wistfulness at the corners of her smile and in her eyes.
But now all at once it had gone. It had disappeared magically, like morning mist with the first kiss of the sun, and the young man’s reserve had also gone. The waiter had become accustomed to the sight of this particular young man and knew that he was normally very reserved. But now, as if he had put aside a cloak, he had come to life.
Valentine never quite knew how it was—normally she didn’t get into conversation very easily with young men who found it necessary to share a lunch table with her—but after the first quarter of an hour of sitting together at that little table with the check cloth with the sunshine pouring its molten gold all around them and the shadow of the vine leaves flickering on the cloth, she and Peter Fairfield seemed to know all that was vitally important about one another. She knew that he had an apartment in the Montparnasse quarter, and that his uncle who had an estate in Norfolk gave him an allowance, that it wasn’t a very big allowance and he was hoping to astonish the world one day with a book he was writing about the Greek islands. He had lived on the Greek islands, was capable of becoming lyrical about the light and color and the people, and he thought that his book could be very easily adapted to become a play, or even an operetta, if he could find someone to compose the music. A friend of his was willing to have a shot at it, and between them—who knew?
Valentine was quite fascinated by the perfection of his strong and beautiful teeth as he smiled, and she confessed that she had always wanted to visit the Greek islands herself—although she hadn’t been aware of it until today! And then she told him, all in a rush, about herself. Miss Constantia, and her legacy, and she saw his eyes grow wide with amazement as he listened.
“Any snags?” he asked. “Or is the money just yours to do with as you will?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it won’t be mine—really mine—until a year is out,” she confessed, playing with the cutlery. Suddenly she felt acutely embarrassed at having to make the admission she had to make, having gone so far. “Miss Constantia wasn’t in the least eccentric, but she did have rather a ‘thing’ about marriage—she never married herself, you see—and ... and I have to marry within a year if I want to keep the money!”
“I see!” he said. He stared at her. “Any particular future husband selected for you, or is that part of it left to you?”
“It’s left to me.” She went on playing with the cutlery and avoiding his look, and then she laughed lightly. “But of course one doesn’t marry for ... for reasons of that sort. I don’t suppose Miss Constantia herself honestly expected that I would rush off and do so just to secure her money, and she probably wanted me to have a year without feeling that if I didn’t work I’d starve, and perhaps to enjoy myself a little. She was terribly kind and thoughtful, as well as generous.”
“Hmm!” Peter Fairfield exclaimed. “And she’d probably become imbued with the French idea that it’s a good thing to marry for practical reasons, not for emotional ones only. And I must say the French have a divorce rate that is lower than in England, much lower, so that system probably has a lot to commend it.”
“But you wouldn’t say it was a good system?” she asked, surprise in her clear blue eyes.
He smiled, “Shall we say it could be good in parts—like the curate’s egg!” And then his smile turned a little wry. “But this is not the sort of thing I wanted to hear from you. I wanted to hear that you were perhaps studying over here, or even that you were employed here—as you appear to have been for the last three months. Three months wasted so far as I am concerned!”
She smiled back. “It’s strange that we should have met like this, isn’t it?” she said a little shyly.
“And we could meet again—or I’d like us to meet again. But how can I ask a young woman of means—and such means! Fifteen million francs—to let me show her some of the sights of Paris, when she’d probably want to pay for every taxi we shared together! No!” He shook his head sadly. “We won’t be able to meet again.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” she said and she leaned toward him across the table, as she said it, and then blushed because it would strike him that she was terribly eager to see him again. “I mean ...”
His eyes grew quizzical. “Give me your word that you’ll leave the taxi fares to me, and I’ll show you Montmartre, if you haven’t already seen it, and all the other tourist musts, as well as some much more worthwhile discoveries of my own that I’m willing to wager you’ll enjoy as much as I did when I first came upon them. You have only to promise that you’ll let me buy lunch occasionally, an aperitif, a coffee—perhaps even dinner one night in a restaurant I know of where we are not likely to be staggered by the bill—and there is no reason why we shouldn’t see quite a lot of one another. That is, of course, if you’re agreeable?”
Their eyes met across the table, and a tiny pulse in her throat gave a little leap. He was the first young man she had ever met whom she really wanted to see again.
“I am ... full of agreement!” she said. “But you must allow it to be ‘Dutch treat’ sometimes! That’s only fair!”
“We’ll see,” he said and smiled as if he was humoring her. “And now what about this afternoon ...?”
“No.” She stood up rather hurriedly. “I must go now. My maid is expecting me... And then she laughed. “I know that sounds opulent, but it’s Miss Constantia’s maid, and she’s now looking after me!”
He shook his head.
“At the end of a year you’re going to find it terribly hard to live a normal life again.”
“I don’t think so.”
She smiled into his eyes, and he put out his hand and took hers, and for the first time their fingers met.
“It’s been awfully nice meeting you.”
“It’s been rather more than awfully nice meeting you!” A taxi came bowling along, and he hailed it for her. As he put her into it he said rather anxiously, “But we haven’t arranged where we’re going to meet again. Same time tomorrow, this place?”
She agreed.
“Same time tomorrow, this place!”
As the taxi wafted her away from him she wondered why
her mood was so completely different from the mood that had claimed her when she had set out that morning. Inheriting a legacy had barely pleased her, meeting him had charmed her!
CHAPTER FIVE
It must have been her mood that caused her to issue instructions to the taxi driver to set her down in the very middle of the Champs-Elysees. It was the second time that day that she had countermanded instructions to a driver, and as she paid him rather more than his fare—which was high enough in any case—she had the feeling that she was being extravagant, mixed up with a delightful sensation that she was free.
Free to walk for a bit and allow some of her curious excitement to subside.
She hadn’t felt as excited as this for a long time, as if the world was all at once golden with promise, and life was a very delightful thing indeed.
Miss Constantia’s death had shocked her—shocked her and almost stunned her. That day in the drawing room at Chaumont, when she had been left so much alone, she had felt as if the only real friend she had had since she was born had gone out of her life. And Dr. Daudet had made her feel as if in some way she had failed that friend, and that in any case she was not nice to know.
Now a young man with blue eyes—perhaps a little darker and deeper than her own, and less like a blaze of delphiniums in a well-kept English border—had reassured her about her being nice to know. His eyes had told her that it would be very nice indeed to go on knowing her!
The Champs-Elysees at that hour seemed alive with color and movement. It was the hour when the fashionable were either returning from smart restaurants where they had lunched, or setting forth on an afternoon’s airing, and the cars that flashed by were expensive and glittering with chromium. Valentine, glancing at them occasionally, thought that Paris was undoubtedly the richest city in the world, for the female occupants of some of those cars had a fortune in jewels scattered on their persons, although it was still daylight.
She thought she would make for the children’s playground, where she would enjoy watching the young play in the sunshine. But barely had her taxi set her down when one of those long expensive cars drew up beside her. Dr. Daudet held open a rear door by the simple process of reaching behind him and said suavely that he would drive her home.
Valentine looked up and around in astonishment, saw that the young woman whose eyebrows had formed a questioning arch earlier in the day was still in the seat beside the driver, and automatically declined the offer of a lift.
“Thank you, but I’ve only just dismissed my taxi,” she said. “I want to walk for a while.”
Dr. Daudet continued to be suave.
“I very much want to have a talk with you, Miss Brooke,” he said to her. “I telephoned after you had gone out this morning, and Martine said it was unlikely you would be in for lunch, so I didn’t telephone again. Madame Faubourg has asked me to drop her at her hairdresser’s, so if it wouldn’t be encroaching upon your time, could I go back with you to the apartment now?” Madame Faubourg leaned across the back of the seat and smiled at her. She was quite exquisite, Valentine thought, taking note of her almost subconsciously: dark and Latin and exquisite.
“You should be more careful about the manner in which you board a taxi, Miss Brooke,” she said in faultless English and on a note of humorous reproof. “Leon and I saw you do so somewhat recklessly, to say the least, after we very nearly ran you down this morning! Were you thinking about your wonderful good fortune, or aren’t you used to our Paris traffic yet?”
Before Valentine had time to answer the doctor said incisively, “Do please get in, Miss Brooke. I am not permitted to park here, and at least I can drop you wherever you wish to go.”
Obediently she sat in the backseat of his car, and as it moved forward effortlessly, with the miraculous smoothness she remembered, and got caught up in the stream of traffic, Dr. Daudet made the necessary introductions over his shoulder.
“Madame Faubourg knew Miss Constantia fairly well, Miss Brooke. Miss Valentine Brooke is very English, Elise, and you two ought to get to know one another. You know England very well.”
“My husband was a diplomat, Miss Brooke,” Madame Faubourg explained, smiling once more almost too brilliantly across the back of the seat at Valentine. “And for two years he was attached to the court of St. James. I loved living in London, and we also had a house in the country. It was delightful, and but for my husband’s untimely death we might still be living there.”
“Oh ... I’m sorry!” Valentine said and thought the other smiled this time with a strange inscrutability.
“Life provides with little blows,” she remarked, “but I have recovered.” She touched the doctor’s shoulder with suede-covered fingertips. “Stop here, Leon, cherie. I am afraid my poor Jules has been kept waiting a little, but it was rather an inconvenient appointment anyway. And I did enjoy our lunch. Thank you a million times!”
She smiled at him, and it was a smile unlike the two she had directed at the English girl. Her eyes under the brief brim of her hat, were like dark, melting, velvet pansies, and her exotic mouth quivered with softness.
“Thank you,” she repeated, barely audibly, and touched his cheek—a mere feather’s touch with those same gloved fingers—before he helped her out and the door of the impressive hairdressing establishment opened to receive her. “Au revoir, Miss Brooke,” she called before she crossed the sidewalk. “It is certain we shall meet again before long, and I shall look forward to our getting to know one another. You must let me introduce you if you have not many friends in Paris. I know, I think, everybody!”
And then she was gone, swallowed up by Monsieur Jules’s gilded portals, and Dr. Daudet opened the rear door of his car and looked in at Valentine.
“It will be easier to converse if you join me in the front,” he suggested. And then with an unusual twinkle in his dark eyes, “You look rather small on that backseat!”
Valentine joined him with a stiffness that he could not help but notice. Her small face, which had looked so bright and alert such a short time before, when he had driven his car alongside her, was set in lines of aloof composure, and as she settled into the seat vacated by Madame Faubourg she clasped her hands primly over the clasp of her handbag.
He sent her a rather curious sideways glance before he started the car.
“You were looking as if you had suddenly discovered that life can be very pleasant when we came upon you just now,” he observed. “Now you look as if you have suddenly remembered that it has a seamy side, also!”
She did not reply.
“Were you feeling particularly, well, for want of a better word, shall we say happy?” he asked, as if his curiosity had to be satisfied.
She nodded her head, and the gold hair fell forward over her shoulders.
“I had just had a rather pleasant lunch,” she admitted.
His dark eyebrows ascended. “With someone who is also rather pleasant?”
She nodded again.
“Male or female?” he said while piloting the car across the Bois.
“Male.”
“I should not have asked,” he said, his lips twisting with sudden cynicism. “A pleasant lunch almost always involves the companionship of a member of the opposite sex.”
You should know, she thought, sending him also a sideways glance, for he had no doubt enjoyed very thoroughly his own lunch with Madame Faubourg. And no doubt there were other Madame Faubourgs!
He seemed to be frowning through the windshield.
“Have you many friends in Paris, Miss Brooke?”
“Not many,” she answered. “Although friends of Miss Constantia have been very kind. Some of them have telephoned.” And not one of them has displayed any hostility toward me, she could have added, but didn’t.
“But this particular friend today ... he was not a friend of Miss Constantia’s?”
“No,” she had to admit.
His frown seemed to settle into a deep cleft between his brows.
“Y
ou are in rather a lonely position just now,” he observed. “It is not perhaps good for a young girl of your age to be in quite such a lonely position.”
Once again she said nothing.
They had reached the quiet district where the apartment was situated, and he seemed to be grappling with a problem that had suddenly arisen. As the car slid to a standstill before the gray facade of the block of apartments he said, looking downward at the chromium-plated wheel on which his gloved hands rested, “I don’t think I’ll come in with you today, Miss Brooke, if you’ll forgive me. I have just remembered that I have to see my secretary about something rather important before four o’clock, and as time is getting on I’d better return directly to my consulting rooms. But perhaps you would lunch with me some time? Tomorrow perhaps, if that is convenient?”
She sat very still for a moment and then said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Daudet, but tomorrow is not possible.”
“No?” He sent her an inscrutable sideways look. “Don’t tell me you have another luncheon engagement tomorrow—with the same man?”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” she answered.
His hands gripped the wheel. She knew that they were very finely shaped hands, and his gloves were a very pale primrose, and against the glittering chromium they fascinated her for some reason. She found herself watching them and the slight restless tapping of one little finger.
“The day after tomorrow then.” There was a note in his voice that suggested that this was an experience new to him, and that it grated because it was new.