‘Didi? A cruise?’
‘Maybe not a cruise,’ Pierre said quickly, thinking of his unorthodox mother to whom a cruise of any sort might well be construed as some form of punishment.
‘What Didi wants is something that can’t be bought. I managed to drag it out of her in bits and pieces and she’s told me that the only thing she really wants is for you to be happy, for the both of you to have some sort of rapprochement…’
‘There’s nothing wrong with our relationship.’ Pierre stood up, went across to his wardrobe and yanked open the door. Quite frankly, the thought of sitting over an elaborate French dinner with Jennifer didn’t seem very appealing at the moment. Three hours ago his life had been a calm, ordered affair, just the way he liked it. Not so now.
‘I never said there was,’ Georgie was quick to reply. ‘I’m just trying to explain more fully why I came here…your mother would like to see you settled. I think, in some weird way, she feels responsible for the fact that you’ve never married…I think she feels that your background was unstable and now you’re reaping the dividends of something that she created without ever meaning to—’
‘What a load of rubbish.’ Out came his boxers, which he slung on, then a pair of black trousers. ‘I don’t believe in all this psychobabble. I suppose you encouraged her into letting it all hang out? I suppose you persuaded her to open up?’ He shot her an acid look. ‘You might teach little kiddies on how to do finger-painting and simple sums, but that doesn’t give you insight into other people’s lives!’
‘I know it doesn’t!’
‘Then what did you think you were playing at encouraging my mother to try and analyse herself? She seemed perfectly all right the last time I spoke to her a week ago!’
‘Well, she wasn’t and she hasn’t been all right for a while!’
‘And your solution, having sat her down on a couch somewhere and imparted your amateur pearls of wisdom, was to tell her what? That she needn’t worry any more about her wayward son because, lo and behold, he was, in fact, going out with you! Never mind that I have a perfectly well-balanced emotional life. In case you’d forgotten, Didi has actually met a few of my past girlfriends.’
‘Um.’
‘Um? What does um mean?’ He was barely aware of pulling a shirt out of the wardrobe and putting it on.
‘Nothing.’
‘You’ve come this far, Georgie! Don’t tell me that you’re going to dry up on me all of a sudden!’
Looking at him, Georgie actually did feel as though her mouth were suddenly stuffed with cotton wool. Her thought processes, for a few confusing seconds, also seemed to be malfunctioning.
He looked terrifyingly good-looking. He hadn’t bothered to brush his hair, but simply swept it back with his fingers, and there was a rakish, piratical look about him that was at odds with the formal wear. When she had been a silly teenager, she could remember looking at Pierre from the sidelines and feeling a frisson of sexual awareness. Retrospectively, she had put that down to a teenage crush, one of those endearing ‘ogle from a distance’ kind of things that every girl had and eventually outgrew.
Right now, the frisson that rippled through her felt disturbingly similar and she had to drag herself back to the reality of who he was and why she so heartily disapproved of him.
‘Okay. By um I mean that your girlfriends…well, they aren’t exactly easy company, are they?’
‘I’ve never had a problem.’
‘Because you enjoy discussing world affairs and fiscal policies.’
‘You mean the boring stuff that makes the world go round?’
Georgie drew in a deep breath and ploughed on. ‘I mean your mother has always found your girlfriends a little difficult to warm to…’
‘I’m finding it difficult to believe that Didi’s sunk into a depression because she hasn’t warmed to my past girlfriends. Which reminds me…’ He looked at his watch and, with a sinking heart, Georgie realised that she had made her convoluted journey and got precisely nowhere, which now left her the awkward task of gently hinting to Didi that the unlikely romance with her son was at an end, or else carrying on with the charade but with the absence of the leading man. Neither was a particularly palatable option.
With stunning accuracy, Pierre looked at her narrowly and pointed out that, aside from anything else, what she had plotted in that scatterbrained head of hers amounted to little more than deception.
‘And you know what they say about those webs of lies…’ he rounded off, before slinging on his jacket and leaving the room.
‘I was desperate!’ She found herself tugging at his jacket and yanked her hand back as though it had been burnt. But the ruse worked because he did, at least, turn to look at her.
‘I’ll say this for you, Georgie. You’re persistent. If you could just harness that persistence to, say…something boring like an interest in world affairs, then who knows how far you could go?’ He would never admit it but her remark about his girlfriends had hit home and he fully believed her when she told him that Didi found them difficult companions. Like Georgie, his mother was a ‘live each day as it comes’ fellow bohemian to whom the gravitas of anything serious was to be sidestepped.
‘And anyway,’ he continued, resuming his sprint downstairs, ‘what would you have told her when the whole phony relationship had come to its natural conclusion?’
‘Oh, who knows, Pierre? Maybe I could just have shunted you off to the New World and created a whole alternative lifestyle for you! Perhaps explorer? Missionary? I could have transformed you into something other than a money-making machine and also done you the favour of relieving you of any responsibility to ever visit your mother again!’
That stopped him in his tracks and when he turned to face her his expression was hard. ‘Be careful, Georgina. I allow you leeway in view of our history, but there’s only so far that I’m prepared to go. Shooting your mouth off about matters of which you are ignorant is unacceptable. I enjoy seeing my mother. If I don’t get to see her as often as we would both like, then that’s to do with the lifestyle I lead. Companies don’t magically run themselves. They need someone at the helm and that someone happens to be me. And before you launch into another speech about the pointlessness of being a money-making machine, just cast your mind back to where my family fortune went and the debts my father accumulated leading his carefree, relaxed existence.’
‘He was happy! They both were!’
Pierre sighed. ‘I know that, Georgie. Look, I have to go. You’d better sleep here tonight. It’s too late for you to head back home and I won’t let you out to roam the streets in search of a cheap place to stay. There are towels in one of the closets upstairs and you can take your pick of either guest room. There’s also food in the kitchen. You can work your way around. Television’s in the downstairs sitting room.’
‘Who are you going out with?’
Pierre raised his eyebrows in dry amusement. ‘Is that a leading question?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I mean that if I tell you that her name is Jennifer Street and that she’s a corporate lawyer specialising in tax, will the information be duly noted and used at a later date in evidence against me?’
Georgie grinned reluctantly. ‘I admit it might be,’ she confessed.
‘So, then, I’d better say that her name’s Candy Floss and she’s a stripper at a nightclub…’
‘Some things are just a little too hard to swallow, Pierre, and that’s one of them!’
‘Because the only thing I really know how to do is make money and the only women I would consider dating are women who make money as well? We don’t just talk about world affairs, Georgie,’ he said softly. ‘We also have fun…’
For a few seconds, Georgie felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of her. A vision of Pierre and his corporate lawyer having fun and not talking about world affairs jostled for position in her head and as she met his eyes, saw the lingering smile on his mouth,
she was struck by his raw sexuality in a way she never had been before.
‘Well, please give my proposition some thought, Pierre…’ She struck out for some neutral territory to banish her wayward thoughts, although her voice sounded nervous and high-pitched. ‘I’m really concerned…’ Drop it by a couple of decibels, she thought. ‘I’m really concerned about your mother and I would do anything to get her out of her state of mind, even if it means carrying through with a pretence. I’m not your type…’ she thought of his elegant, tax-lawyer-style girlfriends having fun before repairing somewhere for a civilised discussion about stock markets ‘…any more than you are mine…but your mother would be happy and that might be all it would need to give her the strength to get her life back on track…’
Why the hell was he feeling guilty? Pierre had no idea because there was no part of him that felt responsible for his mother’s state of mind. He was a dutiful son and, yes, perhaps he could visit with more regularity, but how many times had he invited her to London? To stay with him? Time and again she had refused. No, he had met Didi more than halfway. Yet…
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Georgie,’ he said abruptly. ‘Turn the lights off when you head upstairs.’
He left with his conscience annoyingly murky, which did nothing to advance the enjoyment of his evening. Worse, he began to wonder whether Jennifer really was a touch on the dull side and found himself mentally counting the number of times she referred to her work.
Which meant that he returned to the house much earlier than he had expected. Too early for Georgie to be in bed, judging from the lights shining in the hall. As he walked into the house he startled her emerging from the sitting room, washed and make-up-free and wearing one of his tee shirts and some old jogging bottoms, which she had belted with one of his ties.
They stared at each other, she in surprise at his early return and he in reluctant admiration for an outfit that looked sexy without trying, and just then the telephone rang…right there on the table next to her…What could be more natural than she should pick it up…?
CHAPTER THREE
OR RATHER, what could be more natural to Georgie? The phone rang, she automatically reached for it. She even did it in her friends’ houses and could only explain it away as a habit formed from spending so much time in a school where taking calls was not delegated to anyone in particular but to everyone in general.
Pierre, in the act of removing his jacket, could tell immediately that she knew the caller. Her face broke into an easy smile, the sort of smile that would, without much provocation, he thought, be accompanied by the sort of infectious laugh that would always make even the most dour bore grin. In fact, thinking about it, that laugh had lodged somewhere in his head because he knew exactly how it would sound.
She placed her hand over the receiver and mouthed, It’s Didi. Divested of his jacket, Pierre frowned and began loosening his tie, then he held out his hand for the phone. His opening words were, as Georgie turned away allowing him privacy for the call, ‘Didi. What are you doing calling at this hour? Is something the matter?’
Then she headed for the kitchen because somehow it felt awkward to be retiring to bed knowing that he was prowling downstairs. Fine if she had been asleep when he had sauntered back, but now she felt obscurely obliged to stay up until she made sure that she formally told him goodnight.
Belatedly, she realised that she had kitted herself out in some of his clothes, but they had been hanging in the spare wardrobe, which sort of implied that they weren’t used, and she hadn’t had the foresight to bring spare clothing because she had jauntily expected to be making the trip in one day. Wildly optimistic in retrospect, which was something else to be said for avoiding too much impulsive behaviour.
Anyway, she wondered, what was he doing back so early? It wasn’t yet eleven! She made herself a cup of coffee and mentally smirked at the notion that his idea of having fun couldn’t involve too much of a courtship routine if he could wrap the entire evening up in under three hours! Perhaps tax lawyers preferred speed over romance!
It was beautifully warm in the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen table was a small area with two squashy sofas and a television, which was where Georgie now removed herself with her mug of coffee, and she was beginning to feel quite drowsy when she heard him enter, although she didn’t turn to face him.
Instead, he was virtually upon her before she noticed his thunderous expression.
‘Okay, okay!’ Georgie sat up and made a conciliatory gesture with one hand. ‘I know I shouldn’t have borrowed your clothes but they were doing nothing in the wardrobe in the spare room so I just assumed they were surplus to requirements. Maybe just in a holding bay before being shipped off to the nearest charity shop.’ He still looked like a volcano on the verge of erupting, which, to her, seemed a bit of an overreaction to her using some of his spare clothes. ‘I’ll take them off if you really feel that strongly about the whole thing.’
‘I don’t give a damn about the clothes, Georgie!’ He completed the unfinished task of stripping off his tie, which he proceeded to hurl on one of the chairs.
‘Oh, that’s a relief,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Course, I’ll take them back with me and return them to you dry-cleaned.’
‘I said I don’t care about the clothes!’
From the tone of his voice, Georgie seriously didn’t want to explore what precisely was concerning him, so she looked at him in mute silence. ‘Can I make you a cup of coffee…or something?’ she asked eventually.
‘Coffee?’ Pierre went to the fridge and spoke grimly into it. ‘I think I need something a lot stronger than a cup of coffee!’ Which involved a generous amount of whisky, some soda and ice, which cleverly popped out of a dispenser in the freezer door.
At which point he sat on the sofa next to her and gave her a long look that was only marginally warmer than the ice in his glass.
‘Is a habit of yours to answer other people’s phone calls?’ he opened.
Georgie felt the jaws of a trap yawn open under her feet, but she greeted this remark with an apologetic smile. ‘I know. It’s awful. An awful habit. It’s because there’s no receptionist at our school. At least there hasn’t been one for ages. The last girl left and since then we’ve spent our budget on more important things, which means that the phone calls come directly through to the staff room and it’s up to whoever’s in there to field the calls. So when I hear a phone ring, I just tend to pick it up without thinking.’
‘Which pretty much describes how you do most things, Georgie. Without thinking. Without thinking you fabricate some ridiculous story about the two of us having a relationship…without thinking you hare up to London to try and suck me into your crazy scheme…without thinking you grab the telephone the minute it rings without any notion whatsoever for respecting someone else’s privacy—’
‘I admit my common sense sometimes lags behind a bit—’
‘Sometimes?’ He swigged a mouthful of his whisky and soda and looked at her acidly. ‘Well, the outcome of your common sense lagging a little bit behind is that my mother is now convinced that that little fairy tale you spun for her is one hundred per cent true. Why else would you be answering my telephone at ten-thirty at night if we weren’t involved in some heady relationship? Seems you told her that we’d been meeting up now and again over time but you didn’t want to say anything to her because, apparently, it was all too new? I’m not sure when these so-called meetings were supposed to take place, but no doubt you have the answer to that mystery!’
‘Some weekends,’ Georgie admitted in a small voice. She stared down into her cup of coffee and prayed that the ground might open and swallow her up, possibly flinging her back in time to before she had recklessly opened her big mouth and dug herself into a hole.
‘Some weekends…’ Pierre repeated flatly and she nodded.
‘I airbrushed over the details,’ she mumbled. ‘Just sort of implied that it had been all very clandestine and exciting. I know I sho
uldn’t have done it but your mother was crying a bit, saying how much she wished that you and her were closer, that she would die without ever seeing any grandchildren born, that she didn’t understand those women you had brought to see her in the past…’
‘And, finding your tender heartstrings tugged, you decided that the kindest thing you could do would be to concoct a fantasy about us!’ He didn’t much care for the thought of his mother crying. She wasn’t a crier. In fact, he remembered her as being full of life, laughing a lot, drawing people around her because of her exuberant personality. She hadn’t been born in England but she had married his father and however much he had disapproved of their irresponsible lifestyle, he had to admit that she had integrated perfectly into the country life. Had, in fact, become something of a pillar of society.
‘I’m not a monster,’ he told her briefly. ‘I can see you might have been tempted to soothe my mother, but she’s fallen for your story hook, line and sinker.’ He sat back and momentarily closed his eyes.
‘She must have been very upset when you told her the truth,’ Georgie said quietly. ‘You have every right to be annoyed…’
‘Annoyed?’ He opened his eyes and stared at her incredulously. ‘Annoyed? Annoyed is something you feel when you’re waiting for a letter and the postman arrives an hour late! Annoyed is not being able to find where you’ve left your house keys!’
‘Oh, all right,’ Georgie snapped, ‘I get the picture. Enraged, then. Is that a better word?’
Pierre looked at her narrowly. ‘Why do you imagine I would rescue you from the discomfort of letting Didi down yourself? After all, you’re the one who got us both into this mess in the first place.’
‘You mean you didn’t say anything to her?’
‘She wasn’t in the frame of mind to have her high hopes dashed.’ He had finished his drink and he now stood up, but, instead of refilling his glass, he poured himself some water and sat back down on the sofa. It gave her barely any time to consider her options. Or rather to face her one and only option, which would be to slink back down to Devon and confess all. She was pretty sure that whoever composed the motto about confession being good for the soul hadn’t been thinking of this particular scenario.
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