Kingfisher Tide

by Jane Arbor

  "Marie—yes. She's as good as a Blue Guide for putting newcomers into the local picture. I suppose she told you Maurinaire relies hardly at all on tourism; that it lives by taking in its neighbours' washing and, for the rest, is entirely Saint-Guysupported?"

  “yes__,

  "So you leapt first and looked later, and now are dismayed by what you see ? Even though a large-scale map could have told you that we're wholly a cork-producing region on a cul-de-sac of land leading nowhere but to the sea? However, since you are committed now, there should be ways in which I can help you. Or did Marie, as the estate's self-appointed Public Relations Officer, mention that, in common

  with several of my other long-term tenants, Madame Bonnard enjoyed her profits rent-free?"

  Rose nodded. "Yes. But I couldn't possibly ask you for the same concession !"

  "Why not, if it would help your finances? Madame Bonnard didn't make a virtue of pride for pride's sake, so why should you ? Think it over. Meanwhile—" his pause changed the subject, "you said, I think, that your stepsister understands this trade. But what about you?"

  "No. In England I was a confidential secretary to the senior of a firm of exporters to the Continent."

  "Who would give you references? I ask because I could offer you an added source of income if you would consider it. As a part-time social secretary to my mother. She is much in demand as patron of charitable organisations all over France, and in frequent correspondence with a great many more. They are interests which she has very much at heart, but I haven't the time to help her and there is no one suitable locally. So what do you say? Bearing in mind," he added, "that the current French salary rates are probably less than those you are used to, and that my object is to help my mother, not to create a job specially for you."

  Ignoring the barb she read into that, Rose said, "I'd be grateful for it. But shouldn't I need a labour permit? And if I had to work here with Madame Saint-Guy, there's the difficulty of Sylvie's running the shop alone on the very little French she speaks.!

  "You can leave the matter of your permit to me," he told her. "For the rest, you would only need to come up here, say, once or twice a week—if that.

  You could take work home with you, and if your sister is going to learn French, she'll do it best by being forced to speak it. Besides, there's always my cousin Blaise. He could lend her a hand. He is anglophile, completely bi-lingual, at a loose end and susceptible. Encourage him, and you'll find him haunting your doorstep. But that needn't be such a bad thing while you are both finding your French feet. So you will take the job ?"

  "Thank you. I'd like to, if my French would be good enough for Madame Saint-Guy," said Rose. "It's good enough," he confirmed.

  "Yet yesterday, as soon as I spoke, you knew I was English," she reminded him.

  "But not only by your accent."

  "How then ?" she could not resist the curiosity.

  "From other things about you. For one, the flair with which you wore your raincoat—as if long usage in English summers had made it a uniform."

  For the first time at ease with him, Rose laughed. "Oh dear ! And what else ?"

  "From other small pointers. You had risked your nylons to play knight-errant to a dog to whom you hadn't been introduced, and later, no French girl would have made me argue about my seeing her home. You were also so determined to find some foreign windmills to fight—all English traits, in my experience. But about your excellent French ? Didn't you tell us at tea that you lost your contacts with France while you were still a child ?"

  "Yes, but I was at school at a convent run by French nuns. Afterwards I cherished my French by taking it at night-school and I kept in practice by

  dealing with all my employer's French correspondence."

  " 'Cherished' it ?" He caught at the word. "Then you always meant to use it over here again one day ?"

  "Oh yes. It was a dream I kept in front of me—that I would come back, and not just for a holiday either."

  "Only to find the dream shattered by the reality of Maurinaire?" he prompted.

  She shook her head. "That was just the shop. I think I could love Maurinaire itself."

  He took her up again. " 'Could' ? But you are reserving judgment on the more hoary of our feudal ways, eh? I see we must tread softly ! I'll warn the denizens of our part of the forest."

  But to the studied irony of that Rose deemed silence to be the only reply. They rejoined the others at the tea-table just as a telephone rang and Blaise got to his feet. "That will be for me," he said, and disappeared into a room nearby.

  A moment or two later he returned to lean against the doorpost, addressing his cousin from there.

  "How wrong can one get? Not for me at all," he drawled in English. "It's Flore ... for you ... from Tangier. I promised her you wouldn't keep her waiting."

  As the other man rose and excused himself, Blaise's added murmur of "Cork interests in Morocco, my foot !" was embarrassingly audible to both girls, though Rose hoped the insolent echo of her own words had escaped Madame Saint-Guy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE least pleasant impression the girls brought away from that first visit to the Chateau was of the measure of hostility between Saint-Guy and Blaise Varon which neither man troubled to hide.

  Comparing notes, Sylvie's estimate was that it arose simply from their difference in age and make-up of character. "You'd hardly expect that rather arrogant upstage stuff of Saint-Guy's to go over very big with an easy-to-know person like Blaise," she claimed, on the first-name terms which she and Blaise had established within moments of their meeting.

  But Rose sensed that the thing went deeper than a mere gap of years or a poles-apart difference of manner and outlook. The firmest of friendships, she knew, were often made of just such unlikely material, and she was inclined to believe that only some fundamental long-standing quarrel could account for the frequency and tartness of their criticisms of each other.

  She was to be proved right. During the week or two it took for her labour permit to come through, their almost daily visitor was Blaise, whose expansive readiness to discuss the affairs of the estate as well as his own left them in no doubt as to the cause of the friction which soured his relationship with Saint-Guy.

  To do him credit, Blaise was disarmingly frank as to his part in it.

  "Let's face it," he grinned, "I've been a bit of a drone in my time, though not all my time, if you get my meaning. I have plenty of ideas; I simply lack the wherewithal to carry them out. For instance, it wasn't my fault that, just as the English motel thing I've told you about seemed ready to pay off, my partner absconded with the funds. But of course it cost Saint-Guy quite something to prise me out of the ruins, and as I'm not very good at touching a grateful forelock, it didn't exactly help our relationship along."

  "Have you no people of your own, apart from Madame Saint-Guy ?" asked Sylvie.

  Blaise shook his head. "Only a vague relative or two who scarcely know I exist. I lost my parents during the war and came to the Château then. I have a small income, but no capital, and the general idea was that when I left school I should 'go into cork.' "

  "And why didn't you ?" Rose asked.

  "Because," he explained with an air of patience due to a child, "cork bores me. For one thing, it takes too much room—hectares upon hectares of it. For another, it's so hideously long-term. Or didn't you know that, even when you've coaxed an acorn to sapling size, it's going to be twenty years before you can strip a centimetre of bark from it, and another ten before you can do it again ?"

  Rose laughed. "I didn't know. But isn't that the pattern of husbandry all over? You plant something, you tend it and wait for it to grow, and if you love your job enough, you don't count the cost of your work and your patience while it does?"

  "Even if it takes twenty years ? No, thank you. I've better uses for my time. But that's cork. Around this

  time every year you start—you call up the local girls to clear the scrub from the roots;
then you prune; then you strip the matured bark; then you boil and compress and ship the stuff; then you put in herds of hogs to eat the surplus acorns, and in your spare time you're making nursery plantations from the rest. You make money at it, of course. Pots. But no—" Blaise shook his head again—"you need to be born into cork to make it the dedication Saint-Guy does. It's not for me, and even for him there could be easier ways of making a living."

  "But if he loves cork-culture as you say he does, do you suppose he has ever wanted any easier ways?" queried Rose. (Odd, she reflected as she spoke, how almost any exchange of this sort with Blaise had the effect of throwing her on to Saint-Guy's side !)

  Blaise shrugged. "Evidently not. But that's not to say he need be quite so tiresomely obstructive over denying them to me."

  "Why, what do you want to do that he could help you with ?" asked Sylvie.

  "Much the same as I was doing in England. Yes, understood"—he forestalled interruption—"it was a tactical error on my part to choose a partner who didn't know the difference between mine and thine. But this time all I'd ask of Saint-Guy would be his signature to the lease of a parcel of land to me and perhaps a cash loan which he could well afford—and neither of which I'm likely, to get, this side Of a miracle or a change of heart which he won't have."

  "You mean you want to start a motel on the estate? Where?"

  "Not a motel, as there's no through-traffic. No, a

  chalet-camp, rather; even running to summer villas as the thing developed. I have the ideal site marked down. Covered in cork at present of course, but easily cleared, and after that there's no reason why Maurinaire shouldn't become another St. Aygulf in about the same space of time."

  "Always supposing Maurinaire wants to be another St. Aygulf, which, according to Marie Durand, it doesn't," murmured Rose, again wondering how she came to be defending a state of affairs which had filled her with blank dismay only a week or two earlier.

  "Up to date," snapped Blaise, "Maurinaire has been shrewd enough to want what generations of Saint-Guys have told it it should want—or else ! But give it the chance to halve its work and double its income by catering for tourists, and it wouldn't be quite so wedded to cork, I imagine—" He broke off to glance through the shop window. "Hello, we've a customer, girls— Or no, not a genuine one perhaps. Flore Michelet, in fact. I'll bring her in—"

  The girls watched him go out to the silver-grey drophead which had drawn up on the pavé. They saw him hand out its driver and salute her, French fashion, on both cheeks. As they stood talking for a minute or two, there was time for Sylvie to mutter, "One has heard 'Flore Michelet this' and 'Flore Michelet that' so often without seeing her that I'd begun to wonder whether she was only a legend." Then the other woman sauntered in ahead of Blaise, and the undeniably glamorous details of the 'legend' took shape before their eyes.

  Flore Michelet was lovely in the cool, impersonal

  tradition of carved alabaster. In the perfect oval of her face the sculptor had set long slanting eyes, a delicate nose and an exquisitely curved mouth. She wore a voluminous chiffon scarf wimple-wise in total concealment of her hair but for the spray-trained gold wisps across her forehead. Shoes, bag, gloves all proclaimed themselves custom-made; there was an enormous scarlet pussy-bow at the throat of her silk shirt and the scarlet-lined coat of her suit dangled from a careless forefinger.

  On Blaise's introduction of Rose and Sylvie, she flung the coat across a display unit and offered an indifferent clasp of her hand to each of them. As she did so her glance appraised them more closely and her question to Blaise—"Do they speak French ?" had much the same ring, Rose felt, as if she had asked—"Does it bite ?" of a strange specimen in a ZOO,

  "Rose does—like one of us. So well, in fact, that she is going to take over some of Tante Blanche's massive correspondence," said Blaise. "And Sylvie is learning, aren't you, chérie? And I should know, for she is letting me do most of her teaching." To Sylvie he added in English, "Come now, darling—do me credit. Flore wants to know how well you speak French."

  Sylvie blushed charmingly. "Oh, seulement un petit peu," she achieved.

  "Just a little? Ah well, it will soon be more," Flore cut off her cool smile for the girl in order to tap Blaise upon the hand.

  "And you—be careful that you don't teach her all the wrong things, or use too much of your careless

  charm in the process!" She turned to Rose and switched on the smile again. "You know, mademoiselle, someone should really have warned you against this one here—that he is completely without scruple and that the girls love him for it. Or am I trying to teach the wise? Perhaps you're both proof against his type, preferring your men a bit more austere, a récart—aloof, withholding something, as I do myself ?"

  But before Rose could reply or Blaise protest his innocence of any guile, she turned her attention back to him. "And now, mon ami, you know why I'm here? To collect you to take you out to lunch."

  Hands in pockets, Blaise lounged back against the counter. "Out to lunch? Not me. I'm gnawing a crust here with the girls," he told her.

  Not looking at him, Flore Michelet made a business of smoothing the fingers of her gloves. "You are coming to lunch. At St. Tropez. With me and Saint-Guy, who is meeting us at L'Ermitage after doing some business there."

  Blaise widened his eyes. "On your first lunch date together after your return from Tangier? Make a threesome, I ? That would make me popular with Saint-Guy !"

  "Not a threesome," Flore corrected coolly. "And don't trouble yourself. When Saint-Guy and I want to be tete-a-the, we can arrange it without your help. No, this is a foursome and my doing—you will be escorting Marie-Claire Odet at my invitation."

  "Marie-Claire Odet? That one—with a face like—like plum-duff and a figure to match? I'll do nothing of the sort !" declared Blaise.

  ,

  Flore frowned. "You will not be tiresome. And you will not, if you are wise, be discourteous to La Odet. Pere Odet, as you know, is about the most wealthy perfumier in Grasse, and if you approached him through his admittedly plain daughter, he could probably do a great deal for your plans."

  Momentarily Blaise hesitated. Then he said, "If you mean money, it wouldn't help unless Saint-Guy would let me have the land. I couldn't afford to buy at Cate d'Azur prices."

  Flore glanced at her watch. "Don't make difficulties, and come along. Interest Monsieur Odet, and I daresay you can leave Saint-Guy to me."

  "Good luck to you," muttered Blaine. And then, "I'm not dressed for lunching out, and I've got my moped with me."

  Flore looked him up and down. "You'll do. L'Ermitage isn't the Nice Negresco, and you can leave your mo-ped here. I'm not putting off Marie-Claire at this stage and I'm not lunching her without you. So come, please—now."

  Her tone made an order of it, and with a reluctant shrug Blaise went, waving back and blowing a kiss to the girls as the car gathered speed and was quickly out of sight.

  It was noon. Time to close the shop until half-past two. As Sylvie locked the till on the morning's small takings and Rose lowered the blind, Sylvie said, "He didn't want to go . . . Did he?" so obviously wanting Rose's agreement that Rose gave it. But Blaise had gone. He hadn't refused flatly to—there was an ugly word for it—toady—for the sake of his ambitions. Which rather spoiled his gay, nonchalant image, and

  she didn't wonder Sylvie needed reassurance that he had gone under protest.

  On the subject of Flore Michelet they were in less dubious agreement as to her breathtaking chic and the quality of her sureness in dealing with Blaise. Like Rose, Sylvie had also felt and resented the critical scrutiny which had seemed to impale them briefly and then to dismiss them as negligible.

  "Do you suppose," Sylvie mused, "that she had heard anything about us from—well, anyone—that had made her afraid she might have to compete? And she was relieved when she found she hadn't ?"

  To which Rose replied a shade too tartly, "On the contrary, I'd say no one as glamorous as that ever en
visages competition, much less fears it." Which she recognised for a slick snap judgment that Flore Michelet might not deserve, but to which she had felt driven by a fear of her own that she was reluctant to analyse.

  A day or two later the post brought her labour permit. The arrangement with the Château was that, as well as any extra time Madame Saint-Guy might need her, she would go up there on Mondays when the Maurinaire shops all closed from midday onwards.

  That first Monday Madame invited her to lunch, and they took it together, neither Saint-Guy nor Blaise being present. It was a meal that was perfect as to its appointments—napery, glass, silver and china all that Rose would have expected of such a household. Only its content was meagre—minute cups of bouillon, a portion each of grilled steak, almost filigree-thin, served with buttered new potatoes of

  marble size. They shared a carafe of red wine and there was no sweet—just coffee accompanied by a single wafer biscuit.

  Her hostess made no apologies for its simplicity, but it did little or nothing for Rose's healthy young appetite, which liked its meals 'square' and had not yet lost its English interest in `pud.'

  Afterwards they adjourned to Madame's study sitting-room where she did apologise for the big backlog of copy-typing which awaited Rose as her first secretarial task.

  She herself, Madame confessed, had never really mastered the typewriter, yet it was not comme it faut, was it, to reply to business letters in longhand ? These should be dealt with first, as too many of them carried last week's date. Then there were cheques to be written, enclosed in answer to appeals and their amounts entered up for Saint-Guy's reference, and finally the rough drafts of some speeches which Madame would not give herself—("At my age, I cannot travel now as widely as I would like")—but which would be read as papers at the charitable society meetings in question.