Beyond the Green Hills (16 page)

He seemed to be about to stand up, but changed his mind and settled back more comfortably in his chair.

‘Your friend, the one who has a gift for drawing animals, how is she?’

Clare beamed with pleasure.

‘Jessie. She is very happy. Her first child was born two weeks ago, a little girl who already has blonde hair. She’s too busy to write to me, but her husband, Harry, who runs the gallery where I worked as a student, writes me notes on the back of invoice forms. I’m afraid he’s quite besotted with his daughter. I’m sure she’ll be horribly spoilt,’ she said, smiling.

‘You will go and see them soon, perhaps? You must certainly be entitled to some holiday.’

‘I … hadn’t thought of it …’

‘Remember that your airline tickets can be purchased through our reception. There are significant discounts,’ he said practically. ‘You are not homesick.’ He paused and regarded her steadily.

She was not sure at the time whether his words were a statement or a question. Certainly she hadn’t known how to reply. She turned over the envelopes in her hand. What did homesickness feel like? That was the problem. Was it there in the disappointment she felt when friends didn’t write to her? Or was it an absence? A vague, unnameable sadness?

She shivered, feeling a sudden chill, though she’d switched on the heating while she was making lunch, and the light autumn sunshine was still warm on her face and legs. Perhaps she’d better go shopping. The letter from London was probably no more than an acknowledgement from the bookshop with which she’d just opened an account. It could certainly wait.

W
inter in Paris was neither wet, nor bleak. There were rainy days when the last of the fallen leaves stuck to the wet pavements and vehicles splashed in the gutters, exactly as they’d done in Belfast, but however much it rained, Clare never felt the grey clouds press down upon her as if they would never lift again.

She was fascinated by the mist on the Seine, and the way the river traffic would then appear and disappear – silent, ghostly shapes, their coloured lights gleaming weakly, barely visible from her window. She loved the crisp mornings when frost iced the cobbles, picked out the swirling decoration on the lamp posts, outlined each individual twig on every bare tree, but what she loved most of all was the colour and life of the city.

As Christmas approached, a sense of excitement bubbled up as all the shops, both large and small, vied with each other for the most striking or most beautiful decorations. Sometimes, buying her own gifts, she was so totally delighted with the swags of tinsel, the loops of fairy lights, the exotic patterns of bells and ribbons and the pure white feathers, she’d completely forget what she’d come for and stand
entranced by the glittering display.

Despite the coming holiday, the volume of work on her desk did not diminish. Then there were invitations from colleagues and from special customers of the bank to be fitted in as well. So when it arrived at last, she was grateful for the holiday itself, spent with the whole St Clair family in the apartment in the Bois de Boulogne. Not quiet days, by any means, with Michelle and Philippe so pleased to see her, so anxious to pursue some of their former pleasures, but very happy days. It was a real delight to be accepted so completely as one of the family.

It was as January and February passed, as full of activity as the months of the old year, that Clare found herself thinking more and more about the coming of spring. With the lengthening of the days, she looked hopefully for the first daffodils or any sign of the trees beginning to leaf, wondered if what she felt was some old, deep longing, born out of her life as a country girl, when the coming of spring would bring such relief, a respite from the cold and dark, the confinement of long evenings, and the anxiety over Robert’s weak chest.

‘Maybe it’s all the fault of the Ritz cinema,’ she said to herself, one bright March day, as she moved around her apartment, unpacking her suitcase after one more visit to London.

‘
Springtime
in
Paris
,’
she muttered, as she put the street plan back on her shelf … Audrey Hepburn. Or was that
Three
Coins
in
a
Fountain
?
‘Which was the one where she models the wedding dress?’ she
asked herself, as she dropped her underwear in the laundry basket.

It seemed as if all the films she’d ever seen, shot in Paris, or produced with painted sets in some Hollywood studio, blended together into one sunny, romantic picture. Young lovers drinking coffee in pavement cafés. Sunlight spilling down as they strolled hand in hand in the Tuileries Gardens. Kisses in the moonlight.

As her mind filled with images she’d viewed from the worn, red plush seats, she laughed aloud. The Ritz had a lot to answer for. All those Saturday matinées she and Jessie had so enjoyed. Ninepence worth of colour and light and never a sad ending among them. Lovers always reunited, families reconciled, implacable enemies converted, or despatched. For a few hours, they’d escaped into a wonderful world where hard work and boredom simply didn’t exist.

But real life wasn’t like a Saturday matinée, was it? People you loved died. Like Edward. People you thought loved you disappeared from your life. Like Andrew. Friends you enjoyed and valued moved into their own lives and forgot all about you. Like Ginny. Like the friends she’d made at Queen’s. Waves of sadness swept over her as she stood staring at a grubby pair of shoes she’d just taken out of their wrapping paper.

‘Come on, Clare. This won’t do,’ she said firmly to herself. ‘You’ll get nowhere if you only look at the losses. Consider the gains.’

She laughed to herself. That was Emile Moreau’s
job. And very good at it he was too. She could almost hear his quiet, slightly hesitant voice as she went into the kitchen and got out her shoe cleaning kit.

A quiet man, near to retirement, his hair almost white, he would come in calmly after the rigorous financial questioning of one of his younger colleagues.

‘I think it is important that we now look, not at your losses, but at the experience your company has gained in the last period of time. If problems have been identified and addressed, then there may well be more potential than your current balance sheet suggests.’

His gentle manner and soft voice did so much to smooth ruffled feelings and rising anxiety. As she translated what he said, she would think what good sense his words made, if you took them out of the world of business and of money and into your own life. Listening hour after hour to people negotiating delicate issues across the table had taught her more than a new technical vocabulary. It had opened up possibilities she’d never thought of before.

‘Don’t ask why you got it wrong, ask what you’ve learnt,’ she said, as she took her well-polished shoes to the wardrobe and closed the lid of the empty suitcase. She pushed it under her bed and sat down with a bump on the padded stool by her dressing table. Surely she’d been thinking about springtime when she’d started unpacking her suitcase. How had she managed to end up thinking of gains and losses?

Spring came for Clare, not in Paris, where she’d
planned to walk under the trees in the Champs-Elysées, but in Provence. Suddenly, one morning, after a meeting in Nîmes, Robert Lafarge asked to be taken to see the wine-making château whose future they’d been discussing.

It was the loveliest of mornings. The sky was a tender, fresh blue, the air mild but not yet warm. The chauffeur-driven car purred along the narrow roads so soothingly that neither Robert nor the prospective new director said a word to each other. She was free to watch the countryside slip past, the fields of newly turned earth, the red-brown soil combed into ridges and hollows as neatly aligned as a ribbed sweater. The hedges and windbreaks were vivid green with new growth. At the gable end of a solitary barn, a pear tree was already in bloom, its blossom a gleaming white against the worn and mellow red bricks of the dilapidated structure.

They stopped on the edge of an enormous vineyard. The first new growth had already broken into soft green leaves. The ancient-looking stumps marched up the hill slopes and into the far distance, like one of those drawings that demonstrate perspective.

Standing on the grassy verges that fringed the dry, stony, reddish earth, waiting for the second car to arrive with members of the château’s staff, she felt the sun warm on her shoulders. She looked down and saw daisies winking up at her in the sunlight. On the air, a hint of smoke, a bonfire of hedge-trimmings. Its acrid note touched her heart. She looked at the daisies with longing, imagining herself
bending down, regardless of her close-fitting costume and high heels, picking them, putting them in a glass in her hotel room in Avignon, taking them back to Paris, treasuring them more than any of the bouquets she’d ever bought from Madame Givrey’s stall.

‘Say, honey, what did the man say?’

The slow, mid-Western drawl betrayed not the slightest sign of irritation, but Clare was horrified when she realised she hadn’t been paying attention. She’d no idea how this large American came to be a director of a French vineyard, but it was for his benefit she’d been required to accompany Robert Lafarge to the meetings in Nîmes.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she apologised. ‘Mr Dubois is explaining that, though the soil would appear rather poor and infertile, it is the particular mixture of minerals in the soil and the aspect of the vineyard itself that give the wine its subtle quality. The high proportion of stones under the rootstocks themselves is not purely chance. It has been observed that the incidence of the sun’s rays, striking these reflective surfaces, has a most beneficial effect on the early ripening of the grapes. This allows for more flexibility in the picking and a greater range of possibilities in using grapes of different degrees of maturation,’ she said quickly, managing to catch up rapidly with the ponderous delivery of the earnest, thorough Monsieur Dubois.

‘Say, now, isn’t that surprising?’

Clare glanced up to find Robert Lafarge watching her, a slight brightness in his eye. She returned his
gaze quite steadily and wondered – as she often did these days – just how bad his English really was.

A week later, Robert Lafarge phoned her at her apartment and asked her to dine with him the next evening, if she had no more interesting engagement. He named a restaurant for which she knew evening dress was obligatory, told her he would send a taxi to collect her and assured her they would not mention the establishment in the Place de l’Opéra.

The day that followed Robert’s phone call left Clare little time to reflect upon his invitation. Louise had been feeling off-colour for a couple of days and finally admitted she wasn’t fit to get out of bed.

‘Mam’selle ’Amilton, we have a serious problem with Mam’selle Pirelli’s absence,’ announced Madame Japolsky, as she threw open Clare’s door and strode across to Louise’s desk. ‘There is a piece of work here which is most urgent,’ she went on, swinging round towards Clare, a sheaf of paper in her hand, a look of great severity on her face. ‘I must ask you to set aside what you are doing and complete it immediately.’

‘But, Madame, what I’m working on has to go to the printer’s tonight,’ Clare replied, picking up an equally thick sheaf of paper from her own desk. ‘Monsieur Lafarge expects to sign it out by five o’clock.’

‘Nevertheless, mam’selle, this German document is essential to Monsieur Moreau. He must have it before his meeting tomorrow.’

Madame’s voice tone had risen several levels.
Always a bad sign. Her left eye was beginning to twitch. When it looked as if she was winking at you, Louise had warned her, you really had to watch out. Paul had once told them when they were lunching together, that he’d nearly turned down the job after Madame took him off to her office and started winking at him.

‘I will do what I can, Madame,’ Clare said quietly. ‘But if I’m called on for visitors, or incoming items, it will simply not be possible,’ she added firmly.

She could hardly tell Madame she had an evening engagement. Madame would assume it was a boyfriend and simply expect her to cancel it. What on earth would she say if she knew she was dining with Robert Lafarge?

‘I shall ensure you are not interrupted,’ replied Madame, equally firmly. ‘Ring through to my office at noon and I shall see that coffee and sandwiches are brought to you here.’

Madame was as good as her word, but even working flat out it was a near squeak. Robert Lafarge’s draft contract went upstairs just before five, but by the time Clare finished the German document the building was empty, except for the caretakers and a courier, who sat patiently outside her door, reading his newspaper, waiting to deliver her translation to Emile Moreau at his home.

As she walked across the echoing entrance hall, under the dimmed night lights, she wondered if she would even have time to have a shower when she got home. But luck was with her. The Metro was very quiet after the rush hour. She was able to walk
quickly in the uncrowded corridors and a train came along the very moment she reached the platform. She arrived home twenty minutes before the taxi was due to pick her up.

‘Amazing what you can do with practice,’ she said, as she peeled off her clothes, dropped her shoes on the rack and took off her make-up with a few vigorous sweeps.

The shower was heaven. A few minutes later, she splashed her face with cold water and sat down at her dressing table. Louise had taught her how to make-up in six minutes.

‘It is easy, Clare, but you must give it your complete attention. It helps too if you are naked. Then if you drop something it doesn’t matter.’

As she did what she’d been told, she suddenly remembered the story of the night Louise dropped eye oil on her only available dress.

‘There was nothing else for it,’ she said, rolling her dark eyes and throwing her hands in the air in a wonderful gesture somewhere between supplication and despair. ‘It was my only dress – I had to wear it. I spent the whole opera visit clutching my evening bag to my stomach to cover the mark. And it
never
came out.’

Clare had no such dramas. With one evening dress at the cleaners and another still being pinned on the model at the bank’s couturier, she didn’t even have to decide what she should wear. Tonight, it would be her very first evening dress, a blue silk, not unlike the one Louise had lent her for her first visit to the opera.

Dressed and ready, with minutes to spare, she hung up her costume in the damp shower cabinet to let it recover from the day’s sitting and took out tomorrow’s costume from the wardrobe, ready for the morning. As she heard a taxi draw up outside, she blessed Louise for teaching her all the tricks she herself had learnt in her first year at the bank. Tonight, she’d never have managed without them.

‘So, you see, I too have an intimate knowledge of horses, though I never learnt to ride.’

Robert Lafarge paused, took the menu the head waiter presented to him and studied it with the same intense concentration Clare had seen him apply to balance sheets and company reports.

‘If I might suggest …’ he began tentatively, looking up and watching her, as she ran her eye over the impressive document in its red and gold leather cover.

She closed the menu and smiled at him. Not only was she sure that his judgement would be reliable, in a restaurant he clearly knew well, but she was so hungry she had no doubt she could manage whatever was put in front of her.

‘When the Marquis went off to war in 1914, naturally he took his groom with him,’ he continued, as the head waiter disappeared. ‘Sadly, neither he, nor my father, ever came back. My mother had never been strong, though she had borne ten children. She died a year after the war ended,’ he said matter-of-factly.