Out of Sight (6 page)

‘It's more than that,' protested Leonie.

‘Go easy, Lennie,' said Stella. ‘What's all the rush? You hardly know this guy yet, let alone what he might be after.‘

‘Well, he's not exactly trying to jump my bones, is he?'

‘Maybe not. But is this really what you want? To feel so … nervy about someone. At least get a better sense of who he is before you start investing yourself like this.'

‘I'm not handing him my life savings!'

‘You've only just got back on your feet after Greg.'

‘I've got to take a risk again some time.'

‘Listen, I'm sure your instincts are good. Take care, that's all. I don't want ever again to see you as upset as you were last year.'

Trying to ignore the obscure resentment evoked by Stella's sensible warning, Leonie switched the discussion to her friend's new job. After several stressful years working for an adoption agency, Stella had recently moved to a charity which reunited adopted adults with their original birth families. Hearing how her friend was already benefiting from a more optimistic working environment, her intrusive thoughts about Patrice took a back seat.

And yet, in quiet moments over the next few days – driving to work, waiting for a kettle to boil, removing her make-up, falling asleep – Leonie found herself stubbornly turning over like a pebble in her mind the conviction that her heart had begun to nurture some renegade life of its own. Stella was right to urge caution; she hardly knew this man, and reassured herself that she could still as easily turn away from the startling feelings she had for him as welcome them in. But nevertheless she was intrigued, excited, fearful – not of Patrice, but of the prospect of some fresh dimension of experience. It was time for her to change, to grow. And she was now absolutely certain that some entirely new way to feel would open before her if only she could draw near enough to Patrice to let it happen.

*

Leonie assumed, when Patrice rang to invite her laughingly to the ‘grand opening' of the salon he had restored in his grandmother's house, that there would be quite a few other people there. She was more than curious to meet his friends and, flattered by the likelihood that she was about to be accepted among them, was almost disappointed to discover she was the sole guest. He had waited for her arrival to open a bottle of champagne, but she suspected from his slight clumsiness in pouring the wine that this was not his first drink of the evening. She took his evident jumpiness as a further sign of how favoured she was to have gained entrance to his home.

The marble fire surround, window shutters, plasterwork and parquet flooring of the salon had all been painstakingly renovated. The amount of work involved was clear from the dilapidated state of the entrance hall and other ground-floor rooms, all of which Patrice showed her. It appeared that he inhabited only a narrow study, the quaint black-and-white-tiled kitchen, designed as the domain of servants rather than of the original owners of the house, and, presumably, some sleeping quarters upstairs. Leonie was aware from the address on the card he had given her that he saw his homeopathic patients at a modern rented office in the centre of town.

After the tour, which included the beautifully kept garden at the back of the house, they perched decorously together on a Louis
seize
-style sofa, tightly upholstered in a faded satin of red and white stripes, and placed their
glasses on an incongruous Sixties glass coffee table, which was the salon's one other piece of furniture.

‘It must seem strange to you that I live like this,' Patrice observed lightly.

‘No, I like it.'

‘I'll be forty next birthday. I ought to be more settled at my age.'

‘Why? People should live how they like.'

‘The house was already starting to get shabby when I was a boy. Josette had spent forty years here by then.'

‘Josette?'

‘Yes. She didn't like to be called
grand-mère
. She didn't much like children, come to that.'

‘What about when you were older? Did you get on better then?'

‘I never saw much of her. Not as much as I should, I suppose. I drifted rather, after university and everything, and she never seemed particularly to care whether or not I came to see her.' He took a reckless gulp of champagne. ‘I was named for my grandfather. A hero of the Resistance who was killed at the end of the Occupation. I'd catch Josette looking at me, and knew I was never good enough.'

‘Yet you don't mind living here?'

He looked around, surprised, as if this question had never occurred to him before. ‘No. No, I don't. But then I couldn't imagine existing anywhere else. It's a house that absorbs outcasts. A kind of safe house for three generations that failed to belong elsewhere.'

‘Is that how you were made to feel, when you were sent here in the holidays?'

He was puzzled.

‘An outcast,' she repeated.

‘Oh, then. Yes. I suppose I was a bit. Certainly abandoned. Unwanted. You must remember how kids get about things. I always believed it was my fault that my parents sent me away, didn't want me with them; another reason why Josette was always so unforgiving about having me.' He gazed around the room, where lozenges of evening sun were lengthening across the newly polished parquet and shadows were beginning to pool in the furthest corners. ‘I've enjoyed the work. It's very meditative. A psychologist I saw once thought I should take anti-depressants, but sanding and painting and varnishing are far more effective.'

She looked at him in surprise.

‘I want you to learn the worst about me,' he said in a rush. ‘I don't want you thinking I'm a good bet when I'm not.'

She was moved. ‘Is anyone?'

‘I'm sure you are.' Embarrassed, he topped up their glasses while Leonie glowed at the compliment. ‘I'm in two minds which room to do next,' he went on, before she could speak. ‘Maybe it should be the hall. What do you think?'

‘It would look rather grand.'

‘The hall it shall be, then.'

He contemplated the room once more, dwelling with obvious satisfaction on his craftsmanship. But after his avowal she felt relaxed enough to bear his silence. Then, to her surprise, and without looking directly at her, he reached out and took her hand, wrapping both of his around it as if it were the most natural gesture in the world.

‘It's rubbish that I was abandoned, of course,' he said. ‘My father worked for multinational companies that kept moving him around all over Europe at fairly short notice, and I boarded at school in England, so it made sense for me to come here. Though I suspect I was right about Josette being resentful. I think she felt my mother showed a lack of respect in expecting her to look after me. Like it meant that Josette lost face somehow in the eyes of the town. She was a very proud woman.'

‘Are they still alive, your parents?'

He nodded, and at first she assumed he wasn't going to say more. ‘Poor Maman,' he said at last. ‘They say it's not Alzheimer's, but she's not sure who I am any more.'

Leonie filed that away to tell Gaby; it might explain why Agnès had failed to stay in touch with Catherine, her old friend from school.

‘Dad and I keep a distance between us. After he put Maman in a home in Surrey, he found a grateful widow to take care of him and moved to Bournemouth. So that was that, really,' he ended drolly.

Leonie couldn't help laughing. ‘My parents divorced, but
I get on fine with my stepfather and stepsisters. He's Canadian, and they all moved back there when I finished university, so I don't see them much. My real father drifted away years ago. Can't say he was missed.'

Patrice squeezed her hand, and she caught his eye, hoping he was about to kiss her, but he didn't. ‘I hope you like risotto. Come and talk to me in the kitchen while I stir.' Managing to pick up the nearly empty champagne bottle without letting go of her hand, he led her through to the kitchen. Once there, he placed his hands on her shoulders, guiding her into a chair at the wide table while he lit the gas, took down an ancient iron pan and set about chopping shallots and fresh herbs.

Leonie looked about her. Nothing in the room appeared to be new. The image of Miss Havisham flitted into her mind, and she couldn't decide what to make of this bizarre set-up. Why return to the scene of his not-happy childhood? If his marriage had ended because of another woman, maybe his heart had been doubly broken and, like Leonie herself, he had run away. Yet why, having returned here, had he failed to alter and renew things? He didn't come across as a man who was stuck in his ways, was neither fussy nor self-neglectful. So what was going on?

She studied his movements as he discarded vegetable peelings into a bin for the compost and reached up for a box of arborio rice from a cupboard, and her growing fascination with his psychology melded with the first real stab of desire. She resisted the strong temptation to stand up,
wrap her arms around him from behind and inhale the smell of him.

‘Tell me more about homeopathy,' she requested.

‘Sure? It's a huge subject.' His tone was light and amused.

‘How did you get into it?'

‘Drawn to it, I suppose. Poor Maman was anxious, obsessively so, and as a kid I had the usual omnipotent fantasies of finding a magical cure that would make her better, make her happy. Orthodox medicine failed to appeal to me, but I was always interested in ideas about treatment and healing.'

‘I know next to nothing about it.'

‘I'm still learning. It's an endless challenge.' He proffered a misshapen box grater. ‘Fancy doing the Parmesan?'

It felt good to stand and work alongside him. One of the things she most missed about Greg was having someone to cook with. Though Gaby was endlessly hospitable, she was an unimaginative cook and had little patience for tasting, adjusting and thinking ‘what the hell' with new combinations. But Patrice was dextrous, observant, well-attuned, and the thickening risotto smelt delicious. Glancing up at him as he judiciously added a last ladle of stock, she found her gaze wandering to his top shirt button, once again imagining tracing the brown skin beneath his collar. He caught her eye and briefly held her gaze. She stopped breathing, sure this time that he would kiss her. Turning off the gas, he announced, ‘It's done. Let's eat.' And he busied himself setting the
table with mismatched silverware and chipped, old-fashioned plates.

They ate opposite one another at the kitchen table, and now he did ask her where she had grown up, about her student years, her affinity with this part of France. She realised that he had an easy way of eliciting feelings rather than facts; yet, when their fingers touched as she handed him her empty plate, she saw once again a shyness, a physical reticence. She found it endearing, the lure of unavailability erotic. She, too, was essentially modest, but if there had been no women in his life since he returned to France – and four years was a long time for a man – then maybe he needed to be both enticed and reassured. She wasn't sure she could bring herself to make the first move, to seduce him, but, on the other hand, what did she have to lose? A little dignity? She was old enough to survive that. And why else, after all, would he have invited her alone tonight and then exchanged confidences as he had done so readily?

Patrice served a
tarte aux pommes
from the local patisserie and strong coffee in tiny cups, while answering more of her questions about homeopathy, explaining miasms and susceptibility and dyscrasia. Normally she would have dismissed such unlikely concepts as hocus-pocus, but tonight she was ready to suspend her critical faculties and respond instead to his genuine commitment and belief. His hopefulness and earnest wish to help the people who came to him in distress reminded her of Stella. Only a
cynical beast could mock such well-meaning and oddly astute idealism. Their conversation petered out, and Leonie looked at her watch: eleven-fifteen.

‘I should go,' she offered, not meaning it. They both rose awkwardly to their feet. In the embarrassed stumble towards the door, she turned into him, placing her hands against his cotton shirt and holding up her face for a kiss. Even then he hesitated. Impulsively she placed her lips on his. They were cool and soft, and she realised she had been right: although he had evaded the role of seducer, he now pulled her to him and kissed her as if he could draw from her mouth some elixir of life.

He soon led her upstairs, where the house was, if anything, even more neglected. He left her outside the bathroom, where a giant sink and claw-foot bath were both streaked with green below crooked brass taps, and the wood of the lavatory seat was worn smooth as silk. The window overlooked the silent garden, and as Leonie swiftly washed her face and rinsed her mouth she gazed out into unfamiliar darkness. Emerging, she tiptoed across the hall towards the light shining from Patrice's bedroom. He had switched on a rosy-shaded lamp and turned back the worn linen sheets on a narrow double bed that looked too short for his height.

He laughed at her surprise. ‘I had this room as a boy. We'll manage, won't we?'

‘Yes!'

‘Back in a minute.'

To her dismay, he went out, brushing his fingertips across her collarbone as he went. She sat on the bed to take off her shoes, wondering whether to undress. Unsure of the etiquette – she hadn't done this with anyone other than Greg since she was at university – she decided, with a shiver of excitement, to wait for his return. Besides, she almost appreciated a moment alone to take in his room. There was a vaguely religious framed print over the bed, matching bedside cabinets edged with brass fretwork, one piled with paperbacks, the other bearing a modern clock-radio and the lamp. The curtains of faded
toile de Jouy
were an odd choice for a boy, and Leonie guessed intuitively that this had previously been Agnès' room before she married and went away. A small rag rug on the parquet floor by the bed, a chest of drawers, a cupboard built into the alcove beside the disused fire-grate and an incongruously ornate dining chair with a broken stretcher made up the rest of the furnishings. It was all strangely comfortless.