Peach (49 page)

She had plotted and planned with the interior designer how to turn the mansion from a gloomy family museum into an elegant Parisian symbol for de Courmont. They had removed a great deal of the heavy old pieces of furniture, opening up the house into new vistas of space, so that each lovely antique was displayed at its best. They’d brought a breath of fresh bright colour into the rooms and now, when the house was filled with flowers and lit by glittering chandeliers and soft shaded lamps it glowed with a new warmth.

Peach liked her room best of all. Its long windows overlooking the river were swagged with apple-green silk taffeta tied back with great bows, and she’d chosen a beautiful needlepoint rug from Portugal in shades of green and apricot. A comfortable white sofa stood in front of the marble fireplace with a low table holding her books and papers and there were pretty lamps dotted about throwing pools of soft light. Everything was new in here, including the man in her bed.

He wasn’t the first one Peach had shared her bed with in the past six years and like the others he was charming and amusing and for a while he made her feel good. Laurent Lessier’s family owned a famous old champagne house in Épernay. Peach’s grandmother still kept up with her old friends from the war years and returned to Épernay annually to visit them and she had met Laurent then. He was thirty-five years old, good-looking and very charming. He’d taken her to dinner and to parties at
châteaux
in Reims and Épernay and then he’d come to Paris to see her and one thing had led to another. I’m like Harry, thought Peach, sipping her coffee, I can’t resist a pretty face. But that was being unfair to Laurent! He was nice and he cared about her and he made love to her beautifully. Then why did she wake up in the morning with him naked beside her and feel so insecure? Here she was, the successful businesswoman, part-time mother and occasional lover, and she felt as lonely as when she’d first left Harry.

Putting down her coffee cup with a sigh Peach got out of bed and walked across to her desk. Her engagement book was open and across the usual black scrawl of dates and times and places she had written in red ink and large letters:
WIL’S CRICKET MATCH
. 2
O’CLOCK. SCHOOL
. She’d meant to return to London last night but Laurent had shown up unexpectedly and taken her off for dinner and then he’d
come back with her and she hadn’t needed much persuading to stay. The little green enamelled Fabergé clock entwined with pearl lilies of the valley that had been Grand-mère Marie-France de Courmont’s showed exactly seven o’clock. Plenty of time to make the nine o’clock flight. She’d go to the mews house in Belgravia first and make sure the daily housekeeper had made up Wil’s bed and that the refrigerator was stocked with milk and juice, and she’d pick up the special cake he liked from the pâtisserie in Sloane Square. She always felt better when she was seeing Wil, especially when she could whisk him out of school and have him to herself for a night or two. She and Harry had been sharing him in the holidays, more for Harry’s convenience than anything else, but mostly she had him because when Harry was writing he needed to be alone. Sometimes Peach stayed at Launceton but then both she and Wil would soon get bored and she’d take him up to London or off to Paris for a few days and they’d have fun together. It was the best part of her life, being with Wil. The odd thing was that Wil wasn’t in the least like Harry—except that he was good at cricket. Wil’s eyes had never changed from the dark blue of babyhood and were like hers—and Monsieur’s. And he had Monsieur’s dark hair and strong face and mouth.

The fight with Harry over the school had been tremendous and she’d felt such a fool afterwards because Wil liked school so much. He enjoyed boarding and being with the other boys—Harry had been proven so smugly right. Peach knew that Harry took Augusta, dressed in her proper English-lady manner, to visit Wil at school. And of course when Peach went she wore the latest Courrèges or Givenchy short skirts and little flat shoes. She’d given up trying to be like Augusta for Harry. She was herself.

Peach lifted the curtain and peered out into a grey morning. The river was swathed in a soft mist.
Fog
. My God, she
hoped it wouldn’t delay the flights … she couldn’t be late for Wil’s big day!

Wil Launceton carried a cup of tea carefully across the grass to Aunt Augusta, managing to spill only a little bit in the saucer even though he wasn’t concentrating on what he was doing. He was worried about his mother. She had promised to be here for the match and he’d been waiting for her since twelve o’clock because she was supposed to be here for lunch. The headmaster had given him a message that his mother was delayed by fog in Paris. It was expected to lift and she would take the very first available flight. But it was now tea-time and she still hadn’t arrived.

He handed Aunt Augusta her cup politely and sat down on the grass beside them, still worrying about Peach.

“You’ll get grass stains on those nice white cricket flannels,” Augusta told him, sipping her tea.

Wil stood up obediently but he did think that his mother would never have said that. Gosh, he was looking forward to staying at the house in London! His mother was sure to take him out to dinner at the sort of restaurant he liked and not the stuffy grand ones he went to with Augusta and his father. He wished she would hurry up, though, because soon it would be his turn to show her off to his friends—they all thought she was super and not a bit like a mum and they told him all their fathers thought she was
really
pretty.

“You’ve got a good team there, my boy,” said Harry, proud of his son. “There’ll be a second Launceton name joining mine on that trophy today, I’m sure of it. Just keep your eye on the ball and your arm steady and you’ll do it. Good luck, Wil.”

Wil sipped his lemonade nervously while Harry and Augusta chatted with the other parents. Slipping away from the crowd he circled the broad gravel drive and ran down to
the gates, peering along the road to see if she were coming, but there was no sign of her. He ran all the way back again and just made it to the pavilion in time to put on his cricket cap and send his first man out to bat.

It was five-fifteen when Peach swung the car through the school gates, parking in a flurry of gravel. Running her hands hastily through her hair she leapt out and sprinted around the corner of the school buildings towards the playing fields. God it was hot—that’s why they’d had the fog! She just prayed she hadn’t missed Wil.

All the parents were sitting round on deck chairs watching their small white-clad offspring. Checking the scoreboard Peach saw that Wil’s team was forty for three wickets. Their opponents were all out for sixty-three so Wil’s team were doing well. Relieved, Peach strolled across the grass towards the pitch. She could see Wil at the wicket now. It was his turn to bat. Thank God she hadn’t missed him!

Wil frowned. He’d got the sun in his eyes and he was up against a very fast bowler. The hard leather-jacketed ball came at him like a bullet and with lightning reflexes he hit it solidly, sending it flying across the field to the boundary for a four. Wil grinned, he had the bowler’s measure now, he could handle it. They were going to win this match. He just wished his mother were here, she’d promised him and she’d never let him down before. His eyes searched the crowd for her as the bowler paced back along the pitch and then turned running towards him, bowling a fast spinning ball. Reaching into it Wil caught sight of Peach walking along the field towards the pavilion. She was here at last. The hard ball spun off the grass and he was just a split second too late for it. It hit him on the left side of his forehead and Wil staggered for a moment and then fell.

Peach stood frozen at the edge of the pitch as men rushed
towards Wil. The group of small cricketers were clustered around anxiously and she saw Harry hurrying towards him. Then somebody brought a stretcher and they lifted Wil on to it and he lay like a stone as they carried him off the field with Harry walking next to it. With a cry of terror she ran towards them.

“Wil,” she cried, “Wil.” He looked pale and quite normal except for the dark bruise on his forehead. But his eyes didn’t open when she spoke to him and she gazed at Harry tearfully. Augusta appeared at Harry’s side and the headmaster talked about ambulances while Peach listened nervously.

She took Wil’s hand in hers, holding it tightly, praying that he would be all right.

“It’s probably just a concussion,” someone said kindly as they waited for the ambulance. “I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before.”

At the hospital they took Wil off for X-rays and tests and Peach sat opposite Harry and Augusta in silence, waiting. Waves of guilt swept over her, the same guilt she’d felt when Lais had been shot. And now she’d brought disaster again. If only she’d taken the flight last night as she’d intended she would have been here on time, but instead she’d spent the night with Laurent. She hadn’t thought there might be fog. Peach had caught Wil’s glance just as the ball swung towards him. She knew she had distracted him at the crucial moment. “It’s all my fault,” she blurted into the silence. “If I’d been here on time it wouldn’t have happened. Oh God, this is all my fault!”

They put Wil in a white hospital bed and somehow he looked so much smaller than she remembered. Tubes ran from his arms and his throat and machines monitored heart beats and brain waves. But his eyes remained shut.

“You’re just sleeping, darling,” said Peach tenderly, stroking back his dark hair, “you’re just resting for a while. Then you’ll be all right.”

Harry watched them from across the room, saying nothing, and Augusta slipped tactfully through the door, leaving them alone.

“You don’t deserve to be his mother,” snarled Harry finally. “If Wil comes through this, Peach,
if
he does, you can count yourself lucky. But I’ll see to it that you never get near to him again.”

Anna Rushton arrived early at her job at US Auto even though it was her birthday. She always liked to get there in good time because Mr Maddox had a habit of arriving even earlier and he’d usually opened his mail and gone through it by the time she got there. She was forty years old today and she’d worked at US Auto for fifteen of those years. The company was her life but she’d never been as happy as she had the last six years working for Mr Maddox. They could say what they wanted about him in the executive dining room—and she’d heard via the waitresses that there were quite a few grumbles about his high-handed manner—but Mr Maddox was a gem to work for. And he had a magic touch with the trade-union officials as well as the workforce. “Our man Maddox,” they called him at the plant. He was one of them. He’d come from the streets just like they did,
he’d worked on the assembly line and he’d endured the same grinding monotony and shared the same frustrations—and he’d made it all the way to the top. Or almost to the top. Paul Lawrence was still up there as president but Noel was next in line and Anna knew—because as his personal secretary she knew everything that went on regarding Noel—that other companies were already sending out feelers as to whether Noel might not like a change of scenery. Noel Maddox was a brilliant man and if he weren’t so young—still only thirty-nine—he might have been president of one of the major automobile corporations by now.

The bouquet of pink roses was waiting on her desk, just as it had every birthday for the past six years, and there was a little parcel beside it wrapped in a nice blue paper with a silver ribbon around it. Anna smiled as she put away her bag and tidied her hair. Picking up her flowers she read the note. “Happy Birthday Anna—best wishes, Noel Maddox.” In all these years he’d rarely said anything personal to her—not that she looked nice today in her new suit, or that she’d changed her hairstyle—but Mr Maddox always seemed to know when she wasn’t feeling well and sent her home to bed, telling her not to come back until she was sure she was up to it. And when her mother, who was her only living relative, had been so ill, Noel had come to the hospital personally to make sure she had the best doctors. Then when her mother “passed over” he’d had the head of personnel make sure that the funeral arrangements were taken care of and asked if Anna would like a leave-of-absence for a few weeks. Of course she had preferred to work, because hard work was the only way to recover from that kind of blow, but she’d appreciated his thought—and the flowers he’d sent to the funeral.

Anna put the roses in a vase of water and arranged them on her desk. Smiling, she set the little parcel aside until later
and began to sort out Mr Maddox’s mail. When she’d done that she folded his newspapers—the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
, the
Wall Street Journal
and the London
Times
and
Financial Times
as well as the local Detroit papers—and carried them with his mail through to his office. Mr Maddox liked to keep an eye on current political and economic affairs both nationally and internationally.