A Moment in Paris (7 page)

Lady Bembridge tightened her lips. ‘Then on your own head be it, Philippe!’

CHAPTER FIVE

Diana enjoyed the drive from Paris, which, however, involved an overnight stop, and several leisurely breaks the following day, because that was the only way Lady Bembridge would travel. She disliked air flights and had an intense dislike of train travel, and as she was accompanied by her pet poodle—who was not a particularly good traveller whatever the method —Celeste did not enjoy the journey at all.

She was in awe of Lady Bembridge, and suspicious of the acid rejoinders that rewarded her occasional conversational openings; and so for her the miles were mostly silent miles because Diana either sat beside the chauffeur at the wheel or took over the wheel herself.

Philippe had been up early to see them off, in the cool spring dawn in Paris, and had assured Celeste he would be with her in a few days.

‘Be good,
cherie
,’ he said, dropping a kiss on the tip of her nose. ‘And do whatever Mademoiselle Craven thinks is best for you to do.’

Then he went round to help Diana into the car, and himself placed a rug over her knees. She was wearing a neat dark olive-green suit, and at that hour, although she had wasted little time on her complexion, it was as clear and matt as a pearl.

‘
Au revoir
,’
he said softly, briefly. Then, as she looked up at him for a moment: ‘Where were you last evening, mademoiselle? Celeste said you were not in your room when I inquired, and that was shortly before dinner.’

‘I ... I went out to dinner,’ she answered. ‘With a very old friend.’

There was silence for a moment, while Lady Bembridge complained of a draught round her ears, and the cushion in the middle of her back slipping. The chauffeur hastened to the task of banishing the draught, and making her more comfortable.

And the Comte remarked, as if he was speaking absolutely ‘I think I met the young man the other day, didn’t I. My godmother has taken an extraordinary fancy to him, and seems to be very much at his disposal. I hope his Irish charm—and, with a name like his, he couldn’t be anything other than Irish!—won’t yet prove her undoing. Or yours,’ he enunciated clearly, before she could utter a word, and slammed the car door on her.

Celeste let down her window, and waved a gloved hand at him forlornly. But he scarcely seemed to notice it, or her faintly beseeching eyes; and his final instructions, as the car slid silently away from the foot of the steps and approached the great door in the courtyard wall, carried clearly through the window and dropped like hard pebbles into the warm interior of the car.

‘I expect you and Mademoiselle Craven to work, Celeste...!’ he called. ‘You are not to regard the time until I join you as a holiday. I expect you both to work hard and show me some results when I arrive!’

‘Well, really,’ Lady Bembridge murmured, crouching down amongst her furs. ‘For a man in love he has an extraordinary method of speeding you on your way, my dear,’ glancing sideways at Celeste. ‘But perhaps he was merely endeavouring to conceal his distress at parting with you!’

Celeste’s mouth quivered, but she said nothing. The poodle made itself thoroughly comfortable on its mistress’s lap, and settled itself for the first long stage of the journey.

After a quarter of an hour or so, Diana’s cheeks had cooled, and she wondered why Philippe had made that inquiry about her the night before. It was unfortunate that on the only occasion since the Comte became her employer that she decided to avail herself of her right to an evening off, it should have been to have dinner with Michael; but he had given her no opportunity to put him off. He had sent a message round by hand to the effect that he would meet her at a certain restaurant at a stated time, and short of letting him down and making him look conspicuous hanging about for a dinner date that failed to arrive, there was nothing she could do to convey her annoyance when his note arrived save tell him personally that she objected to such assured invitations.

But he had been quite impenitent when he met her; and had she been the same Diana Craven who once hoped to marry him, his air of delight at seeing her again, and his efforts to entertain her once they got inside the restaurant, might have melted her.

But she was not the same Diana Craven, and it didn’t matter to her at all that he had never once forgotten her and that he could hardly be more delighted than he was because they were both in Paris, and free to meet sometimes.

‘The Duchesse is quite prepared to give me a lot of time off if you’ll go places with me,’ he said, faint pleading in his handsome eyes as he laid his hand over hers. ‘She thinks you’re one of the most attractive young women she’s ever met, and she told me I was utterly mad to let you go. I was! I know now that I was.’ A note that might have been genuine feeling made his voice quiver slightly.

Diana removed her hand until it was well away from his, and admitted that her own employer, the Comte de Chatignard, was of the opinion that his godmother’s expressed sentiments were not always wise.

‘She offended him badly the other day when she mistook me for his fiancee,’ she said. ‘And I’ve rather gathered the impression that he doesn’t like his employees to have followers.’ He tried once more to take her hand, while the soft lights in the restaurant made a lovely muted red aureole of her hair. ‘I don’t care what your employer thinks. I wouldn’t care if you had a dozen employers, and they tried
to come between us!’

‘This one hasn’t any intention of coming between us,’ she assured him composedly. ‘But he knows my story, and he thinks I’d be sensible to give you a very wide berth in future.’

Instantly his eyebrows arched, and for a second or so he looked very arrogant.

‘Is that so?’ he said drawlingly. ‘And by what right does your employer give you advice, if it isn’t an indiscreet question? And was it absolutely essential that you should pour your life history into his ears?’

She shook her head, unable to prevent a slight flush at that “if it isn’t an indiscreet question”. There was nothing indiscreet in the conduct of the Comte Philippe de Chatignard and the young woman he employed to coach his fiancee, but they both knew that underneath their formal behaviour there were dormant fires and dangerous possibilities that they neither of them dared explore. Therefore even the suggestion that there was something indiscreet in their relationship was a little too near the truth to have no effect whatsoever.

‘But for you,’ she told Michael, hoping he would attribute that increase of colour to the warmth of the restaurant, ‘he would never have known my life history.
You
chose to announce that we had once been engaged, and his interest was somewhat aroused.’

‘I see,’ Michael said, and looked mildly self-conscious. ‘I suppose I did rather blurt it out, but I was so taken by surprise that I was temporarily off my guard. Well, did you explain to the Comte that our romance was dead, and beyond being revived?’

She looked down at her plate and the delicate garnishing of
champignons
that made her escalope of veal look appetizing.

‘Of course,’ she answered.

He was silent. And then he said quickly: ‘But now that we’ve met again!... Diana, it’s difficult to be certain when a fire is out, and something tells me it would be an extraordinarily simple matter to get ours going again. If you feel that I let you down, well ... I felt that you let me down. You preferred that little half-brother of yours, Jeremy, to me ... or so it seemed.’

She requested painfully: ‘Don’t let’s talk about it now.’

He twirled the stem of his wineglass.

‘All right, I won’t ... not now. But by some trick of fate we’re both working in Paris, and we’ve got a chance to rake over the ashes of that old fire. It may be that they’re far from cold. Let’s find out, shall we, Diana?’

‘Aren’t you forgetting that our circumstances are still the same?’ she asked stiffly.

Somewhat to her surprise he grinned.

‘Don’t you believe it! ... Madame la Duchesse de Savenne has taken quite a fancy to me, and it could lead to all sorts of things. My present job isn’t much—that is to say, there isn’t very much status about it, but I get a thumping good salary—but I could serve her in other ways, just as satisfactorily. She’s got a lot of property, and some of it must need managing... Devoted henchmen don’t last for ever! And she knows I’ve got ideas, modern ones.’

‘I shan’t be in Paris very much longer,’ Diana said quickly. ‘We go south to Savenne in a few days.’

‘Then, in that case, I shall persuade the Duchesse to go south to her neighbouring estates in Savenne.’

But, thought Diana, as they drove along the road which led out of Paris, and would presently turn southwards, she had no desire whatsoever for Michael Vaughan to turn up in Savenne. Actually, she hoped quite ardently that he would do nothing of the kind.

And that was strange—really intensely strange—for not much longer than a few weeks ago she had still imagined she was in love with him. She had cherished a couple of letters which he had once written to her, and kept a theatre programme locked away among her very personal things because it was a souvenir of an evening which—only a very few weeks ago—she had believed to be the happiest evening of her life.

For it was in the interval between the second and third acts, in the noisy and crowded bar of the theatre, that he had asked her to marry him.

But one of the first things she did, after she re-met Michael in Paris, at that luncheon the very thought of which had so petrified Celeste, was to burn both the letters and the theatre programme by dropping them into a fire when no one was looking.

The Michael episode was finally and irrevocably over, and she knew it. Never again would she imagine herself in love with him, in spite of his persuasive grey eyes and that sleek, shapely golden head of his. She was absolutely free of the unhappy burden of loving Michael, but she was not free of loving. One moment in Paris—one moment when she had looked into the eyes of a French aristocrat—had altered not merely the trend of her thoughts, but the trend of her life.

That night they stopped at a very comfortable hotel in a populous market town, and in the morning they dawdled a bit because Lady Bembridge was not in a mood to be hurried on, and the poodle had to have exercise. It was Diana who exercised him, and enjoyed herself for a brief while making the acquaintance of the charming old-world streets and houses, and buying herself a bunch of violets from a woman flower-seller.

When she got back to the hotel Lady Bembridge was still in bed, but Celeste was waiting for her, looking unusually fresh and alert for that hour of the day. She was wearing one of her most attractive suits, and she took the bunch of violets Diana had bought and buried her nose in them.

‘They’re gorgeous, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘Different, somehow, from the flowers one gets in Paris. And I like it here. It reminds me a bit of my own home town, although nothing in America is as old as this, of course. Why didn’t you ask me to go out with you?’

Diana looked astonished. ‘But you’re never up at this hour.’

‘Well, I am today!’ Celeste said, almost blithely.

They went inside, and had coffee and rolls at a table in the window, with the morning sunshine streaming through the window and pouring over them, the scent of the violets which Diana had insisted Celeste should attach to the lapel of her suit filling the atmosphere around them, and mingling with the odour of croissants and roasting coffee-beans.

Celeste had developed an appetite since she left Paris which further astonished Diana, and she also made a few overtures to the poodle, who responded by accepting various tit-bits. Diana couldn’t help thinking, as she studied her, that this was a different girl from the one she had first got to know, and she wondered whether it had anything at all to do with the miles that separated her from Philippe—and his implied criticism, despite the physical attraction he held for her.

‘It would be nice if you and I were going off somewhere for the day, wouldn’t it?’ Celeste said unexpectedly. ‘Just going off somewhere sightseeing together! I’d adore to be a tourist, with nothing else on my mind...’ Then she looked towards Diana and coloured. ‘Well, what I mean is ... if there were no Lady Bembridge. She gives me an inferiority complex.’

Diana could understand that, for Lady Bembridge delighted in making the American girl both feel and look small...

Examining the problem dispassionately and silently while they finished their breakfast, Diana could see nothing but trouble ahead for Philippe if he refused to accept Celeste, as she was.

And, looking at Celeste, she wondered whether the girl herself really knew what she was doing. Whether she could ever be happy—really and truly happy—attempting to fill a role the very thought of which alarmed her.

And suddenly she had a mental picture of Celeste, married to a man with whom she could be completely relaxed, and for whom she need put up no form of pretence ... and it was a very different Celeste from the girl who was hastening to devour the last crumbs of her roll before Lady Bembridge joined them—a slightly haunted Celeste, whose appetite would fail the instant a pair of malicious mascaraed eyes focused upon her.

By evening they were in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and the light was dying all around them.

The road climbed, tunnelling deeply into the mountains and overhanging ravines, and frozen peaks brooded aloofly above them, and on all sides of them. They were not the dizzy giants to be found in Switzerland, but they stood out splendidly against the sky, with the fires of a spring sunset painting it like a canvas.

They approached a small mountain town, at the foot of which spring flowers clustered thickly in the meadows, and a river wound like a ribbon. The river was swollen with the melting of the snows and the rising of the spring floods, and in places it overflowed on to the floor of the valley, forming little lakes. Everywhere there were evidences of spring, although up on the heights it was intensely cold, and Diana was glad she had brought a fur coat with her—Although, by comparison with the furs that protected Celeste and Lady Bembridge, it was a very poor thing indeed, blatantly squirrel, and dyed at that.

When they swept under an arch into a white-walled courtyard Diana realized they had arrived. She descended stiffly from the seat she had occupied for so many hours and was dazzled by the sudden flinging open of a door, and a stream of yellow light that poured into the courtyard. There was a slight babble of voices, and then a sharper voice that rose above them like the curling of a whiplash and demanded to know why they had taken such an unnecessarily long time over the journey.

‘You should have been here at least a couple of hours ago. Why weren’t you here before dark?’