Daughter of Riches (63 page)

‘Hello?'

‘Who the hell is that?' It was a man's voice, not one she knew.

‘Debbie Swift. Who are you?'

‘I'm trying to get hold of Louis Langlois. Do I have the right number?'

‘Yes, you do, but he's asleep.'

‘I'm afraid you'll have to wake him.'

Debbie began to feel alarmed. ‘Who is this? What do you want him for?'

‘I'm Robin Langlois, his brother. Would you get him to the phone, please? It's very urgent.'

She went back into the bedroom, pulled the sheet back and shook Louis by the shoulder. He stirred, mumbled and hunched the sheet over him again.

‘Leave me alone.'

‘Louis – please – you must wake up. Your brother is on the telephone. I think it's important. Louis,
please
!'

After a rug of war with the sheet and some more grumbles she thought she had won but a moment later she could see Louis was fast asleep again. In desperation she went back to the telephone.

‘I'm sorry, I just can't seem to wake him. He's like a zombie. Can I give him a message or get him to ring you back or something?'

‘He doesn't change, does he?' A loud sigh. Then: ‘Perhaps he might just wake up if you tell him his father is dead. And will he please call me back without delay.'

‘His father …?' Debbie repeated, shaken, but the click at the other end told her the line had been disconnected.

She stood for a moment holding her wrapper tightly around her while her mind chased in panicky circles. She had never had to break bad news to anyone before; she didn't know how to go about it and the prospect was scaring her to death. It wasn't fair of his brother – Robin, did he say his name was? – to expect her to do it. She wasn't a policewoman. At least he could have told her to have another go at waking Louis and stayed on the line whilst she did. But it was too late now. The brother had gone and the ball was very firmly in her court.

Debbie went back to the bedroom. Louis was fast asleep again, blissfully unaware. She bent over the bed, shaking him.

‘Louis, please! You must wake up!'

He stirred, reaching for her.

‘What's wrong, Kitten? Come here and shut up.'

‘No! Louis, there is something I have to tell you. Didn't you hear the phone?'

‘No. Do you know you have the most beautiful tits …'

‘Louis!' She dragged his hand out from inside her wrap. ‘ Will you please listen to me! It was your brother on the phone. Your father is dead!'

The minute she had said it she could have kicked herself. She hadn't meant to say it like that. His fingers froze half way back inside her wrap, his face seemed to have turned to stone.

‘I'm sorry, Louis,' she half-sobbed. ‘I didn't mean to tell you like that. But you wouldn't listen.'

For a moment he lay unmoving and she wanted to cry for him.

‘I'm really sorry. Oh, Louis …'

He pushed the sheets aside. Her first thought was that he was going to get up and swing into action the way she imagined people did when told a close relative had died. He would have to phone his brother back, call the airport to check up on flights home to Jersey – there would be a million things to do. But Louis just lay there, lithe and unclothed, his body taking on a golden glow from the early sun that was streaming in through the enormous picture windows.

‘It doesn't matter,' he said.

‘What do you mean, it doesn't matter?'

‘Would it matter to you if someone told you that your father was dead?'

‘Louis, I never knew my father.'

‘No,' he said, and there was a strange hard note in his voice, ‘and I never knew mine. Now, are you coming back to bed or do I have to come up there and get you?'

If Louis's unconcerned reaction to the news of his father's death led Debbie to believe that it would make no difference to their lives she could hardly have been more wrong.

When he eventually stirred himself to get out of bed Louis booked himself on the earliest available flight to Jersey and he was gone for more than a week. Debbie paced the house, bored, lonely and unaccountably anxious and when Louis returned she was able to get very little out of him. His father had died of an embolism, he said, it had been very sudden and totally unexpected. His mother and brother, together with his Uncle Paul, were coping with things but the situation might mean he would have to spend more time in Jersey than he had done before.

At first Debbie was excited at the prospect of going with him – her world had been so narrow Jersey seemed to her like an island paradise – but Louis soon made it clear he had no intention of taking her along. Debbie was to stay in London. He didn't want her along on ‘business trips' and anyway, didn't she have some modelling commitments?

Debbie did, and although they were far less important to her than being with Louis she knew all the same that she could not afford to show herself as unreliable. And so, whilst Louis made his frequent trips across the water, Debbie presented herself at photographic studios all over London to model lingerie for catalogues and make-up for the brochures of a well-known mass market cosmetics firm. She even did a TV commercial for a chocolate bar, shivering in a summer dress in a punt on a bright but freezingly cold winter day and trying to devour the chocolate bar with the kind of sensuousness to make viewers lick their lips with her.

Sometimes when Louis came home he spoiled her, as if to make up for his absence, bringing her luxurious presents and once taking her away for the weekend to a cottage on a grand country estate which he said he had access to. The weather had been crisp and cool and they had a real log fire in the grate and the guests at the big house, mostly titled, except for a film actor and his model wife, had called in for drinks at lunchtime and in the evening. Louis had taken her round the grounds and had almost made love to her in a deep drift of bone dry dead leaves – almost, but not quite, they had gone back to the cottage and done it on the rug in front of the roaring log fire instead. Louis had also shown her the swimming pool, empty now, with the covers on for winter, and told her about the pool parties that were held there in the summer. When he promised to borrow the cottage and bring her back again then Debbie had been delighted, thinking that it must mean that Louis still planned to be with her next summer.

At other times though he was curt and ill-tempered with her, refusing to explain what he did during those long weeks when he was absent.

‘It's business,' he said shortly when she complained one day that after only a few days at home he was off again.

‘But your business is here,' she protested.

‘And in Jersey. Look, I can't stay talking now. I'll miss my plane. I'll see you when I get back.'

He kissed her and she clung to him, wanting to beg him not to go but knowing it would do no good. Louis liked her to be his little girl, his kitten, but he hated it when she became clinging or cramped his style. ‘ Just remember it's my business that keeps you in silk knickers,' he had said once, rather unpleasantly, and the words had wounded her and resurrected all her feelings of insecurity. Debbie was still not quite seventeen and the scars of her mother's rejection had gone deep.

She loved Louis, she couldn't imagine life without him. He was her sun, her moon, her stars. Perhaps that was the reason she was so afraid, so chillingly shakingly terrified that he would leave her and she would be alone again with nothing but her memories.

Debbie thought that if that happened she might as well be dead.

One day when Louis was away and she could bear the emptiness of the London house no longer Debbie telephoned Grace.

She had seen less of her friend since that disastrous orgy/party as she was afraid that if Louis got to hear about it he would be very angry and his anger would spoil the precious little time they now had together. Now, however, Debbie was so lonely and bored that she decided to take the risk.

‘It's me, Debbie,' she said when Grace answered her telephone. ‘Are you doing anything?'

‘Now?'

‘Yes. I'm all alone and fed up with myself. Why don't you come over? Or we could go out – have tea at Harvey NichoIIs like we used to and do a bit of shopping. All the summer things are coming in now.'

‘All right. I'll meet you in the restaurant there. Half an hour?'

‘Yes,' Debbie said, smiling. She knew it would take Grace at least an hour, she was a terrible time-keeper, but at least saying half an hour would give her something to aim at.

Whilst she waited for Grace, Debbie wandered round the lingerie department and bought a boned ivory basque and a dainty camisole in pale apricot silk. It was lovely to have money to spend on such luxuries – whatever else he might be, Louis was certainly not mean – and Debbie found herself remembering the days when she had been an underprivileged youngster in Plymouth, able to do no more than window shop and dream. She really should stop crying for the moon and be content with what she had, she told herself.

When Grace arrived the two girls greeted one another with an enthusiastic hug and went into the restaurant oblivious for once to the attention they were attracting – the one glossy black and beautiful in a glorious suit of hot pink, the other the perfect English rose in a simple shift dress of cornflower blue.

‘So what have you been doing? I want to know all the gory details!' Debbie demanded, biting into a Danish pastry without the slightest thought for her figure.

‘Well, I've got myself a new man. Handsome and titled, no less.'

‘Titled!' Debbie thought of the aristocratic man in the Tarzan loin cloth and wondered if it might be him. ‘Are you going to marry him? Grace – you could end up as Lady Something or other!'

Debbie smiled, her mobile cherry red mouth lifting engagingly.

‘I suppose I could! What a thought! Still at least it makes a nice change to find someone single. Most of the bastards have a wife at home, don't they? They think they can have it all ways.' She sipped her lemon tea. ‘How is Louis?'

‘Fine, as far as I know. The trouble is he's away so much these days and it's driving me crazy.'

‘Why? Freedom is not to be sneezed at, my dear. All this and freedom too …' She spread her hands with their white-pearl painted nails. ‘But why is he away so much more than he used to be? Fill me in.'

‘Didn't I tell you? His father died and left Louis a big chunk of shares in his Leisure Group – hotels and an entertainment agency of some sort I think. As the oldest son Louis seems to be taking on an awful lot of the responsibility. I suppose he's doing very well but I don't like it. He seems to be in Jersey more often than he's here these days.'

‘Oh yes, I'd forgotten he's from Jersey. Why doesn't he take you with him?'

‘I don't know. He likes me to be here, waiting for him.' Debbie did not add her private fear that Louis was ashamed of her.

‘I know somebody from Jersey,' Grace said reflectively, getting out a packet of Marlboro and lighting one. ‘Frank de Val. He's some sort of politician over there. Funny, they're often the worst, aren't they, politicians? They are so busy trying to pretend they're something they're not, I suppose. And mostly their wives are really boring, solid sensible middle-class types in twin set and pearls, ideal wife, mother and committee member. Or else they're earnest feminist left-wingers too busy trying to run round looking after everyone else to consider the needs of their own fella. Not a lot of fun either way really. No wonder the men go astray. I don't know what Mrs de Val is like, of course, I never met her. She's always left in Jersey – where no doubt Frank is respected as a sober senior political figure. Lord knows what the people who elected him would think if they knew what he gets up to when he's over here!'

‘What does he get up to?'

‘What doesn't he get up to would be more to the point! If ever there was a man with more fetishes than Frank I'd like to meet him! Black leather and bondage is one but he also likes to dress up … wait a minute, you've met him. He was at Simon Chambers' party. He was prancing about serving drinks wearing nothing but a little white pinny and long black stockings. Do you remember him?'

‘How could I forget? That man looked absolutely ridiculous! And you say he's a Jersey politician?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘I wonder if I dare tell Louis?' Debbie murmured reflectively, thinking what a marvellous imitation of the little fat man she could do to amuse Louis.

‘Why not?' Grace asked.

‘You know very well why not! Because he wouldn't approve at all of the company I keep!' Debbie teased and went back to the counter for another Danish pastry.

Debbie might never have told Louis about Frank de Val if one night she had not had a little too much to drink.

They had spent a quiet evening in with a Chinese take-away and a bottle of Chablis listening to Vivaldi. Louis was uncharacteristically quiet and Debbie, who had been getting steadily more and more tiddly, was wondering how to liven him up.

‘What's wrong, darling?' she asked, sitting on his lap and winding her arms round his neck.

‘Nothing. I'm just tired.'

‘Oh, I see. It's the high life you're living in Jersey, I suppose.'

‘You couldn't be more wrong about that,' Louis said. ‘ There isn't any high life in Jersey. It's too damned quiet and staid. All right if you happen to be a sea gull, I suppose, but otherwise deadly. They're just a lot of stuffed shirts.'

‘Not all of them, surely.'

‘All of them.'

Debbie giggled. ‘I could tell you about one who isn't. I could tell you about one who is quite a lad when he gets away from the island.'

‘Me?'

‘No – well, yes, you too, I suppose. But you're quite tame compared to him.'