The Paris Secret (31 page)

Flora sighed, fiddling with her sunhat and idly watching the masses converged on the thin gold crescent of Garoupe Bay. The private beaches were demarcated by coloured umbrellas –
blue-and-white stripes, red, yellow, gold and white – and on the small patch of public beach, every inch of sand was staked and claimed.

It was a privileged bubble to be floating in, she knew. As the nearest beach to the Cap – where the Vermeils’ estate was situated – it attracted a wealthy, international crowd.
It had to – just a Coke here cost 12 euros. But the people-watching alone was fabulous and she was sure that if she were to hand out her business cards on this beach (admittedly impossible to
keep anywhere in her scanty aqua Eres bikini) she’d probably get a 40 per cent call-back rate.

She changed position again, wondering what Freds was up to, knowing he’d hate it here. ‘Posers,’ he’d groan, scoffing at the Rolexes and diamond toe rings and children
with £200 haircuts. This was exactly the kind of scene he had in mind when he teased her about being ‘so jet-set’ these days. His idea of a beach holiday had a sand dune with a
golf course behind it and grey whales in the water; there wouldn’t be another person in sight – beyond Aggie, of course (Flora didn’t care what he said – she knew they still
loved each other) – and they’d have a portable BBQ tray for cooking up sausages, and a cricket set.

Flora smiled at the thought of it – it reminded her of their family holidays in the Highlands, growing up – before realizing she was smiling and promptly wiping the grin from her
face. How could she daydream when his life was a waking nightmare? How could she even lie here, lazing above the water, watching the social elite at play, when he was potentially counting down the
days he had left of freedom? How could she call herself a good sister, basking in the sun whilst knowing that his days had never been darker?

She shifted position again, feeling guilty.

‘Oh, what is wrong with you?’ Ines demanded, looking up from her book and squinting into the sun at her.

‘. . . Nothing.’

‘Really? Because you’ve been jumping around on that bed like it’s got bugs in it.’

Flora cleared her throat, knowing she was still nervy from this morning’s showdown with Xavier. ‘Sorry. Just a bit restless.’

‘Well, why don’t you go for a swim or do something then?’

‘No, I’m fine. I’ll just . . . lie here. You read.’

Ines arched an eyebrow.

‘Really. Read.’

Ines sighed and went back to her book.

Flora stared up at the roofs that peered out through the dense vegetation on the Cap, jigging her leg in the air. Privacy certainly wasn’t an issue for the residents here – between
the high walls and the pine trees, it was a wonder they had any ocean view at all. There had clearly been a lot of new developments built in the last few years, with contemporary glass-cube
apartments cutting into the rocks, but many of the larger villas were in the old-school colonial style of the Vermeils’ place: tall and blocky, with louvred shutters and painted in ice-cream
colours of mint, strawberry pink, vanilla.

Ines’s family place was set back one street from the sea. It was modest compared to most of the places around here – a mere six bedrooms – but Ines had been coming here all her
life; every summer had been spent on this beach, and she was recognized and accepted by the locals as one of them. Useful, when trying to find a parking spot.

Not that she imagined the area’s VIPs ever had to worry about that. Natascha and Xavier Vermeil probably got a Mexican wave from the crowds on the beach every time they came down here;
they’d probably be allowed to land a helicopter on a lilo if they wanted (actually, she didn’t know whether the family owned a helicopter but she was quite sure that if they did, they
could – that was her point).

She frowned, realizing she was thinking about Xavier again. She shifted onto her side—

‘Oh my God, really?’ Ines demanded crossly.

‘Sorry!’ Flora squeaked, hands held up defensively.

‘You just don’t know how to relax, you know that?’

‘Like your boyfriend, you mean?’ Flora smiled, trying to make Ines smile too.

But she didn’t. ‘Seriously. You work too hard. You’ve forgotten how to chill.’

Flora closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She could chill. She could relax. She could—

Xavier drifted into her mind again. The way he’d leaned over her in the flower room, how his hands had felt on her skin, how his words had told her one thing and his eyes another . . .

She swung her legs off the bed and stood up in one fluid motion. Ines gawped up at her as though she were mad. ‘Ice cream?’ Her voice was high and shaky and she knew she was
perilously close to betraying herself; she needed to move, do something, get away from Ines before she dragged the truth from her.

‘Sure,’ Ines said with a shake of her head and baffled expression that implied she would go along with whatever it was that would calm Flora down.

‘I’ll choose?’ Flora asked rhetorically, sliding her feet into her flip-flops. She went to retrieve her kaftan – only to find Ines hadn’t put the cap back on her
suntan lotion properly and sticky cream had oozed all over it in a gooey blob. She let it fall back in a heap. It was too hot for layers anyway.

‘Why not,’ Ines said, in that same ‘let’s keep the ship steady’ voice.

‘Bruno?’

‘No. He could be hours.’

Grabbing her tiny cross-body Marcie bag and slinging it on over her bikini, not losing a moment, Flora strode along the jetty, the decking boards rattling as she walked. She felt much the same
herself, rattled. It just wouldn’t go out of her head – that damned moment, the sheer perversity of it – her chasing him, for God’s sake! Him practically running from her!
Wasn’t he supposed to be the bad boy?

She climbed the steps and walked over to the café where Ines usually bought the ice creams. There was no queue. Her heart sank. She’d be back sitting down and stuck on that lounger
again in three minutes flat and her nerves would still be jangling.

She looked up and down the pavement. It was set up above the beach, a small hill rising above it and leading back to the shaded residential streets, but she knew there was a grocery shop on the
corner, just opposite Christie’s Real Estate at the top.

An idea came to her. Flora walked over to the valet who had parked Ines’s car earlier. He had flirted a little with her as they’d got out and given him the keys.

He straightened up as he saw her approach. ‘Hi,’ she smiled. ‘How are you?’

‘Good,’ he replied. ‘You?’

‘Yeah, great.’ She fanned herself with one hand, blew out lightly through her lips. ‘Hot.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Listen, I want to get some ice creams from the shop up there. Can I borrow your bike?’

‘My bike?’

She smiled and nodded, indicating the battered black bicycle propped against the wall behind him. ‘I’ll bring it back, I promise. You’ve still got our keys, right?’

He shrugged. ‘. . . Sure.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, flashing him a beam as he wheeled it over, looking perplexed that a girl who had arrived in a Porsche should be leaving on a pushbike.

She pedalled away, feeling the breeze quicken and lift her hair, grateful for the chance to expend some energy and burn off this restlessness that was making it impossible for her to sit. Xavier
Vermeil had managed to boil her blood and then just left her to simmer but she wasn’t going to sit around, brooding on him; she had far bigger things to worry about. She loved her brother and
she needed to place all her emotional energy in him.

She took the long way round, not in any hurry to go back to lying down and having nothing to do but think. Instead she pedalled hard up the hill and turned into the Cap itself, trying to lose
herself in the winding, shaded lanes that were banked on every side by high walls and staffed gates, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys purring softly as they passed by. She had no idea where she was but
nor did she want to either, preferring to hide from her own shadow and enjoy the feeling of her thigh muscles burning and her breath coming fast.

She stood out of the saddle on the hills, sitting back and freewheeling on the other sides, dodging the pine cones that lay where they fell, no pedestrians, no pavements. She meandered lazily in
and out of the roads, feeling heady as the balmy air kissed her exposed body as she darted from searing sunspots to the dappled shade of giant plane and eucalyptus trees. She wondered about the
families who had once lived here, as well as the families that lived here now; the biggest estates were owned almost entirely by Russians, and in fact Abramovich’s yacht
Eclipse
was
currently moored just off the Cap, eliciting a roll of the eyes from Bruno, who had remained resolutely unimpressed.

By the time she pulled up at the corner store thirty-five minutes later, she was puffing and pink-cheeked from her exertions – fatigued but not worn out, shadows still creeping through her
mind – shivering as the air conditioning chilled her skin when she paid for the ice creams.

She hopped on the bike again and glided down the hill, back towards Garoupe. The valet was still standing at his post and she could see Ines with him. Flora waved, the plastic bag with the ice
creams inside dangling from her wrist.

A lime-green Mini Moke – roofless, barely ten inches off the road – was coming up the road in the opposite direction to her. Flora barely noticed. She could tell from Ines’s
body language that she had questions she wanted answers to.

It was only as she passed the car that she saw the dark hair of the driver flash by, the darker eyes. Xavier stared back at her and Flora felt time become elastic again; she felt as though she
was in slow motion, life on a go-slo filter as everything that hadn’t happened between them stretched out, there again, not going anywhere, his eyes locked on hers, unable to look away . .
.

Then he was behind her. Out of sight again, out of reach—

The sharp scraping of metal on metal, the sudden squeal of tyres, startled her, the bike wobbling precariously side to side as she pressed the brakes and tried to stop without going over the
handlebars on the slope. But by the time she was able to look round, he was gone, the bright green paint from his car now scraped along a street light, the only evidence he’d ever been
there.

She didn’t allow herself the luxury of pondering his evident surprise or why he might have been distracted to the point of crashing. She wheeled off again quickly, staying busy-busy-busy,
dismounting the bike in silence as she arrived at the valet’s stand thirty seconds later. He took the bicycle from her, as slack-jawed as Ines. Flora reached into the bag and triumphantly
held out the ice cream for her friend, ignoring both their gawping expressions.

‘What?’

The very air was lavender-scented up here. Grasse, the world’s capital of the lavender industry, was just behind the ridge of hills that the car was slowly climbing and
as they moved away from the blinding glitter of the Côte d’Azur to the dense green lushness of the wooded mountains, the very tenor of the land changed. They had only been travelling
for twenty minutes but the glitz and flash of the promenade, where bikinis were worn with wedges and Pagani supercars sat at the lights with Vespas, had given way to a humbler, more crumbly
aesthetic with rough stone walls and gnarled centuries-old olive trees, giant pines shedding their coats on the pass, the houses painted in spice colours of saffron, cumin and turmeric.

The hills folded in undulating ribbons, pleating back inland before jutting out again, steep sand-coloured escarpments boldly bare as they rose above the forests. Away from the oligarchs’
domination of the coastline, the more modest homes of the merely rich colonized the flatter land in the high valleys amidst the vineyards, with orange and lemon groves landscaped as gardens, and
pools winking up at the mountain road that folded around in ripples.

Flora could already see Saint-Paul-de-Vence ahead of them. It clung to an outcrop of rocks like a giant barnacle, the square, unsentimental church tower like a finger pointing up to God, as
though boldly betraying his hiding place. The grey stone ramparts seemed to meld invisibly with the cliffs, the clay-tiled roofs of the medieval houses ridged and rippling downwards in steps, the
towns in the Provençal foothills beyond indistinct in the midsummer haze.

The cab pulled to a stop in the centre of town, outside a café, its tables shaded with a rattan sunroof, ivy creeping over the walls in sticky tendrils and a giant watermill wheel set
into the side of the building. Flora paid and jumped out, allowing herself to be swept along with the tide of tourists all heading down a narrow street, past the old covered flower market where an
elderly woman was sitting on a deckchair, fruit laid out on trays before her. Opposite was a large pedestrianized square where several games of
pétanque
were being played, surrounded
on three sides by cafés, their tables full thanks to the blistering heat, and people sitting and resting on the low wall.

Flora drifted past. She wasn’t exactly sure where she was going, only that the gallery was somewhere in the old town. The town walls were impossible to miss, rising ten metres above the
streets, the ground itself becoming cobbled, the rounded stones polished but highly uneven under her Hermès H slides. She trod more carefully as she and the rest of the crowd were funnelled
up a ramp leading into the ramparts. The sun was momentarily eclipsed from sight and she was grateful to be back in the shade, unwittingly smiling at the horde of already-hot children jostling by
the public water fountain beneath a giant plane tree.

But if everything seemed oversized outside the town walls – the trees, the view, the walls themselves – stepping through the gate was like stepping into Lilliput: everything seemed
scaled down and tiny, the streets so narrow she felt she could brush both sides with her outstretched arms. The lanes were stepped in parts, rising sharply before levelling out again, the
shops’ wares hanging on the outer walls and doorways like in a bazaar. There were ice-cream parlours and sunglasses boutiques, dress shops selling boho cheesecloth dresses, homewares
boutiques boasting local cold-pressed olive oils and the region’s famous lavender essential oils. And art galleries. Hundreds of them.