Peach (32 page)

Peach’s cheeks flamed as she averted her eyes from the man with Lais, aware that his fingers were resting on the white curve of Lais’s breast. They were expected at Grand-mère’s for dinner, otherwise she would have waited quietly outside until Lais was ready. “It’s time for dinner,” she said.

Lais consulted her exquisite diamond-studded Cartier watch, frowning. Peach knew the rules. “Come back in half an hour,” she ordered, “there’s plenty of time.”

Peach hesitated. Grand-mère hated it when they were late—but the bar was still crowded and no one was making the move towards the next phase of the evening—dinner, then dancing or a party at some villa along the coast. And Lais never left until the others had gone. Or at least, all those who mattered.

“Sweet, that little one.” The man’s fingers slid beneath the strap across Lais’s naked back as he spoke. “She looks so worried about you.”

Lais shrugged away his hand impatiently, ordering another champagne cocktail. “Silly child,” she murmured irritably, “she’s always been a nuisance.”

Waiting on the terrace Peach checked her watch nervously. At last the crowds were beginning to drift off. She watched them climbing into long, elegant cars, hating the women in their high golden shoes and slender strapless dresses, hating them for having what Lais no longer had. “Come with us, Lais,” she heard someone call. “No, no,” waved Lais laughing, “I have another appointment.” She made it sound like an assignation.

The bar was almost empty, just a few quiet drinkers—unknowns—left in the corners. Peach wheeled the chair from its hiding place in the corner behind the bar, and Max put his strong arms around Lais, lifting her from her stool
into her chair. As Peach pushed her across the hall a group of revellers, waiting for their cars by the big double doors, called to her, “Come with us Lais …”

“Sorry,” she called, “but dancing is the one thing I’m no good for any more.”

The man came over to her. “You’re as light as a feather,” he murmured in her ear, “I’ll hold you so close no one will ever know …”

“You are standing,” Lais remarked coldly, “on the exact spot where I stopped the German bullet. Isn’t that right, Peach?”

Peach nodded her head miserably.

“And you know what?” added Lais. “It didn’t even hurt! Isn’t that odd?” She swung her chair round abruptly. “Come on Peach, we’re late for dinner.”

Leonie had closed the green shutters against the afternoon sun and lay propped against the pillows of her wide white bed. Jim was away visiting the de Courmont factories at Valenciennes as he did several times a month, supervising the board and management meetings of the complex group of companies. His work had not been easy since the war. Steel foundries and armaments works had suffered direct hits in the bombing and much of what was left had been destroyed by the retreating German armies. Only the automobile plant had survived more or less intact and it was
there that Jim was concentrating his energies, aware of the need in a postwar world for transportation. The de Courmont auto plants now produced lorries and buses in addition to cars, and the foundries were gradually being built up again. It had been hard work for Jim, but he loved it. Leonie had never known Jim without a project—and always one on an enormous scale on which he could expend his vast energies. He had already run through three successful careers by the time she met him—and he was then only twenty-seven! Son of a genteel but out-of-funds family from Savannah, Georgia, prospecting for gold had brought Jim his first wealth and when he got bored with that he’d tried his hand at wildcatting for Texas oil. Lucky again, he’d parlayed his wealth into property holdings and for years he had commuted between the continents, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to work as easily as other people crossed cities. Finally, he’d left it all to settle here with Leonie. Jim always boasted that he knew every liner on the transatlantic route as well as he knew his own home.

Leonie hated it when Jim was away, missing him as much as she had in the throes of first love. Pushing her hair back from her damp forehead she sat up, staring across the shadowy room at Sekhmet. The smooth granite statue from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt’s history stared back at her from its marble plinth. Its proud lion head with the back-flung mane of hair had a cool impersonal beauty and the solar disc glowed like a halo in the silvery light. This statue and the one of Bastet, the sacred cat, had been Leonie’s legacy from an Egyptian father who had disappeared when she was born, escaping back to the flamboyant circus-world he came from. They had been her “dolls”, all she had had in the way of toys in her poor childhood and, when she had run away to Paris at the age of sixteen, they were the only things she valued to take with her. And she had always
believed that it was when she ran away to Paris that the Goddess Sekhmet took over her destiny. Her life from then had seemed to echo the goddess’s legend. It was Jim who had finally convinced her that it all was her imagination. Or—more truthfully—she had allowed Jim to think he had convinced her. Secretly, she still believed.

With a sigh Leonie swung her feet from the bed and padded over to the window. The little brown cat followed her, blinking as Leonie flung back the shutters and sunlight flooded the room. Leonie absorbed the warmth of the sun’s caress, feeling better. But it wasn’t just Jim being away that was upsetting her. It was her granddaughters. Behind Lais’s extrovert façade was a bitter loneliness that she refused to acknowledge, even to her grandmother. And now Leonie hardly ever saw her other granddaughter, Leonore, except in passing. Leonore was always “just on her way to do this or that”, or simply, “had to sort out a problem here or there” Work seemed to claim her every waking moment and Leonie knew Leonore well enough to understand that she was piling on work and pressure so she wouldn’t have time to think about her true problems. But what were her true problems? For years, thought Leonie wistfully, her granddaughters had confided all their troubles to her. She knew them as well as she knew herself. Now only Peach, still the chatterbox, told all.

“Grand-mère,” Peach had said just this morning. “Oh Grand-mère, I
must
tell you.
I’m in love.”

With her long hair swinging in a fat braid, and her long suntanned legs, scratched from her walks in the hills, Peach looked about thirteen. Biting her lips to stop from laughing, Leonie listened attentively while Peach poured out the story of Harry Launceton.

“He’s so
beautiful
, Grand-mère, just
so
beautiful. He has this thick silky hair that slides over his eyes all the time and
he pushes it back—like this. And his eyes are the greenest—I mean
true
green, Grand-mère. He’s a
famous
writer—and he’s only twenty-five. Grand-mère, I
knew
as soon as I saw him that I would marry him.
I just knew.”

“Peach, Peach,” protested Leonie laughing, “you don’t even know Harry Launceton! I’m sure he’s as attractive as you say and I suppose he’s very talented, but maybe you’re just a little impressed by it all. Fame
and
beauty combined can be very heady stuff even for people older than you. After all, you are only sixteen.” Even as she said it Leonie remembered that at sixteen she too had been madly in love—with Rupert von Hollensmark.

“Grand-mère,” protested Peach, jumping to her feet, “I told you about Harry because I felt sure you were the only one who
wouldn’t say, ‘you’re only sixteen!’
I didn’t even tell Maman because she would never understand, even though she married for the first time when she was
seventeen!
Oh of course I’m not old enough for Harry yet—but I will be. Each year that goes by brings Harry and me closer together. And when I’m old enough—eighteen or nineteen—then Harry Launceton will marry me.”

Despite herself, Leonie laughed. “And does Harry know this?”

“Of course not, but he will, when I’m ready.”

Leonie stared at Peach, seeing in her shining dark blue eyes a glimpse of Monsieur’s passion. And his obsession. “And what if Harry should fall in love with someone else in the meantime?” she asked. “After all, he doesn’t know he’s supposed to be waiting for you.”

Peach shrugged her shoulders. “No matter,” she said airily, “he’ll fall in love with me when he meets me. I’ll make him love me.”

Leonie hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry. If this were anyone but Monsieur’s granddaughter she would have dismissed
it as schoolgirl nonsense. But Peach’s words had the ring of truth. She believed what she was saying. Remembering how Monsieur’s obsession had cast a shadow over her own life, Leonie was worried.

“Eighteen is old enough isn’t it, Grand-mère?” Peach did a little pirouette of sheer exuberance, stopping in front of Leonie, a smile lighting up her lovely face.

“Oh Peach,” said Leonie sadly, “you have lots of growing up to do. Forget about Harry Launceton and enjoy your life.”

Caro Montalva always preferred to travel south by train. She enjoyed boarding the long, important monster at Paris’s Gare de Lyon and being pampered by attentive stewards who knew her well. She enjoyed dining in the elegant restaurant car with its intimate rose-shaded lights and fresh flowers, its gleaming silver and its excellent food. And like a child, she enjoyed curling up in the spotless linen sheets, with the dark industrial north speeding by the windows, only to wake to southern sunshine and the train running alongside the sea with the blue mountains in the distance and puffballs of yellow mimosa promising warm Mediterranean weather.

This time she was travelling with a companion. Maroc, Leonie’s oldest friend—who had emerged from his sprawling retirement palace on a hillside in Tangier to pay his annual visit to Paris, and then to Leonie. Maroc’s eyes were closed. His face was unlined and his dark hair was as thick and crispy curling as when she first saw him working with Leonie as the little parcels boy at Madame Serrat’s lingerie shop on the rue Montalivet. Could it really be fifty years ago? Caro sighed. They were all getting old, no denying it. And she was the oldest of all. Her bones creaked protestingly when she got up in the mornings and her glossy black
hair was silver-white—a colour she had never cared for. Why couldn’t hair turn to say sapphire blue when one got older? It would have suited her much better. But her back was still straight, her legs still good and she was always dressed by Dior—although she did admit to having a little flutter at Balmain every now and again. She was seventy-four now, after all, and it simply meant she had to plan things well ahead so that she had the time and energy to prepare for them. Going to Leonie’s had taken a month’s preparation—two weeks for her to get used to the idea of leaving her apartment and venturing forth—she who had travelled the world as though she owned it! And two weeks planning her clothes, having her secretary organise tickets, and just simply looking forward to it. Even better, Edouard d’Aureville’s sons, Jean-Paul and Vincente, were to be there—the first time she had seen them since Lais and Leonore were children. And probably the first time Lais and Leonore had seen them in years, too, for though they were cousins the d’Aurevilles lived thousands of miles away in Rio de Janeiro.

The train began to slow down as they approached the outskirts of Nice. “Wake up, Maroc,” said Caro, digging him with the tip of her lizard-skin shoe. “We’re here.”

Jean-Paul d’Aureville was the image of his father and Leonie’s eyes returned to him time and time again across the dinner table. He had the same strong bones. It was Edouard d’Aureville to whom she had entrusted her baby Amelie, convinced that Monsieur was out to destroy them both, and it was Edouard who had brought up and loved Amelie as his own, and not just his brother’s, daughter. Later Edouard had married the beautiful Cuban girl, Xara, and with their twin sons had moved from Brazil to Florida, where Edouard had built the hotel Palačio d’Aureville, one of the first and
grandest hotels in the then village of Miami. Amelie had married their distant cousin, Roberto do Santos, and, when she was widowed at a young age and left with two small daughters—Lais and Leonore—she had taken over his job of running the hotel.

Vincente d’Aureville was dark, like his mother Xara, with her large brown eyes and olive skin. He was a paediatrician, and Jean-Paul, like Leonore, was a hotelier, running the d’Aurevilles’ other famous old hotel in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro.

“My father is working with yours, you know,” Jean-Paul was saying to Leonore. “He’s had this idea brewing for years and now they’ve drawn up plans for a new hotel in Switzerland. He’s always been intrigued by what you achieved with your Hostellerie, I think it’s been a big influence on their new designs.”

“In Switzerland?” Leonore was interested. “In Geneva or Zurich?”

“Neither. In a little town on top of a mountain. It’s to be a winter resort hotel but father’s planning summer activities too—a golf course, maybe even a race-track.”

“That sounds like Edouard,” said Leonore, smiling.

“And Gerard,” added Lais.

“They build dreams,” said Peach suddenly. “What they really want is to make people happy.”