CHAPTER V
The next morning he was at the house before ever Jane had finished her breakfast. He walked in and helped himself to a brioche, and she poured him some coffee after Clarri had arrived somewhat hurriedly with some additional china.
“I saw your car, m’sieur,” Clarri explained, and when Jane enquired what car, he walked to the window and showed it to her.
It was bright red, and a sports model, and sitting on the drive in the sunshine. Jane had the conviction that she had seen it somewhere previously - that or its twin - but she couldn’t recall where or when, so she simply said: “Oh, I thought that you meant that your other car had arrived!... The one that I—”
“The one that you took a dislike to.” He shook his head at her sternly. “No; that has not been restored to me yet. But this one is going to take you out for the day.” The pretended sternness vanished, and his eyes smiled at her in such a way that her heart started to thump, and she felt sure that her own eyes actually glowed. “That is,” he concluded, softly, “if you wish to be taken out for the day!”
“All day?”
“Yes; all day.”
They exchanged a long look, and then she fled away to fetch a chunky white woollen cardigan, which she slipped on over her lime-green linen dress. There was considerable more breeze today, and it stirred her hair as they started off, and he told her she was “charmante”; and when that made her blush lightly, told her she was “tres charmante”, which made the colour burn her skin.
He was obviously a demon for speed, and the red car sang along the white, dusty road, which broadened once they left the village behind, and became quite a respectable highway once they had plunged through a tiny market town. Etienne said that they would drive on and on until they got bored, or until they felt the need for lunch, when they would stop at the first inviting sign that promised a varied menu. After which they would have the whole of the afternoon in which to do nothing at all, if that was what they felt like, or drive on still farther, if Jane wished to see as much of the countryside as possible.
Jane hadn’t any particular wishes that day, save to be where she was, in the seat beside the driving-seat. She had hardly slept a wink all night, because something so profound had happened to her that she was actually afraid of it - in fact, much more than afraid! - and all she wanted to do was lie back in a relaxed attitude in close proximity to Etienne, and hear him talk gaily above the somewhat noisy roar of the engine, the mutter of the exhaust, and the sighing of the wind past their ears.
When she had first met Etienne, such a very brief while before, she would never have believed that he could be such a carefree personality once the mask that had deceived her slipped. From disapproval to cynicism, cynicism to mockery, mockery to a more gentle form of derisiveness, and now downright gaiety - that was the road her getting to know him in not much more than forty-eight hours had travelled! The variety of his expressions fascinated her, the way his white teeth flashed almost impishly at times, the crookedness of his smile at others, the devastating charm of it at all times. He was not good-looking, but he had something more than mere good looks. Feminine eye-lashes, mesmeric eyes, a gypsy darkness, the grace of an athlete.
His hands spoke for him - beautiful, shapely hands that were extremely well cared for - and, like all Frenchmen, he was full of sudden gestures. And he was so sure of himself. Jane hadn’t a very vast experience of men, but she knew that this one was so sure of himself that it sounded warning bells inside her head ... He grasped the wheel of the car surely, he was always certain of his way, his voice had a certain incisiveness about it at times - and at others she simply wanted to shut her eyes and go on listening to him talking, about all sorts of things, from the ungainly way in which a chicken crossed the road, to the reason why the Tower of Pisa leaned, and would go on leaning throughout several more centuries (short of an atomic explosion) without falling down.
He declined to talk seriously about anything that could be classified as a serious subject - why talk seriously on such a day as this? was his protest - apart, that is, from music, literature, and the arts. She discovered that he had a fund of knowledge that even her father hadn’t possessed about the lives of such people as Shakespeare and Dickens. “Your Mr. Dickens,” he said, “and your Walter Scott ... How much I loved them when I was a boy! I would have liked to have been a second David Copperfield and walked all that distance from London to Dover!”
And although he loved Paris, and asserted its superiority over all other capitals, he was prepared to admit the attractions of other capitals as well. London had something which he couldn’t quite describe. Vienna was gay, Rome was dignified, New York was stimulating ... Perhaps even a little too stimulating. And then he started to enthuse about the islands of the Mediterranean. She gathered that he loved sun-lashed islands, such as Capri, Corsica, Sicily ... And it was only when he mentioned Sicily that he seemed to grow tired of talking about sun-lashed islands. It was just as if a cloud had actually crossed the face of the sun, or a sudden weariness descended on him, for his voice went flat.
He fell silent, and Jane waited for him to continue, but when he did it was to assure her almost conventionally that if she liked forests she wouldn’t find any finer than those which France was so careful to preserve. And the mountains of the High Savoy had everything that the Swiss Alps claimed.
“Do you ski, Jane?” he asked, more lightly. “I would like to see you on skis, buried in a snowdrift up to your nose ... that small, slightly tip-tilted nose that has exactly two freckles on the tip of it!” - his eyes smiling again as he sent her a sideways glance. “I counted them yesterday afternoon!”
Jane recounted the little adventures she and her father had shared together on their more humble expeditions to foreign places, and it was only when he thought she sounded a little wistful that he told her she was not to talk about her father. He would not permit her to mention Sandra, either, or to dwell upon the possibility of her employer turning up unexpectedly while she was so far removed from La Cause Perdue.
“You are not playing fair,” he told her, shaking his head at her reprovingly. “You are spoiling the magic of this little interlude, which might be quite perfect if you would observe the rules.”
The rules, she asked herself...? And the warning bells inside her head started to ring again. You are being warned, they said, you are being warned!
They stopped for lunch in a little town with tall houses and cobbled streets, and a flower-market that overflowed into the main street. The flower-sellers were women who sat comfortably beneath large umbrellas that protected their wares, as well as themselves, from the sun, and the scent of those wares was so heady that Jane realized how far from taking flight summer was in this warm southern region. She particularly admired the almost purplish-red roses that one vendor was offering in generous bunches, and another, seeing her and Etienne approach - they had left the car in the parking-place, and were strolling round the town - held out a single long-stemmed scarlet rose, and looked meaningly from
one to the other of them.
“Scarlet as heart’s blood,” she said. “Mademoiselle would look well with it in the front of her dress!”
But Etienne reached for a blush-pink carnation and handed it to Jane, smiling at her.
“This is more like your English complexion,” he said, and handed the flower-woman a thousand-franc note, and told her to keep the change.
Between the thanks of the flower-woman, and the excuse which the spicy perfume of the carnation offered her to bury her nose in it, Jane hoped that the confusion which welled over her was not noticeable. But as they walked towards an hotel with flower-smothered balconies and pot-plants all but filling the entrance, the confusion turned into something that seemed to prick her a little.
Etienne hadn’t wanted her to have the scarlet rose. The whole world acknowledges the significance of red roses, the symbolism of them, and a carnation as delicate as pale pink china had no symbolism at all.
�
�Pour l’amour ... Pour l’amour!” The flower-woman was saying it roguishly to another couple who approached and Jane felt as if the back of her neck burned, and she wondered whether the scarlet rose would find a purchaser this time.
But nevertheless she enjoyed her lunch, and afterwards they got back into the car and drove off into the forest. It was actually their homeward route, but they took it leisurely, and Etienne seemed to have overcome his desire for speed. He discoursed now, as he drove, on Nature and the methods employed to preserve great forests such as this; and it was not until they nose-dived into a little side-track that Jane realized it was in his mind to stop. The silence, when he actually switched off his engine, seemed to her like something that could be felt, and the little tunnel of green was so shut in, and so secret, there was meaning in the very rustle of the leaves as they bent over to touch the car.
The river must have been flowing near to them, for Jane could hear the murmur of it, and those delicious, half sensuous sounds as something living and moving alighted near to it. A bird, she thought, swooping out of the branches, or a vole darting in and out of the reeds. The bird was joined by another, and then a moorhen made its strangled little quar-r-rk. A whole procession of moorhens passed upstream, but she didn’t see them; she only knew that she had to say something.
“What a heavenly peaceful spot!” she exclaimed. “And this green light beneath the trees is quite fascinating!”
“Is it?” he said, and reached out and drew her purposefully into his arms. Once more she felt his mouth on hers, and once more she yielded her own ... without question, with the knowledge that this was what she had been waiting for ever since they started out that morning. All through the long hot hours of the morning, through lunch, through every breathless moment since. With something prepared to panic in her breast, and the certainty that if he didn’t stop the car she would be rather worse than disappointed.
He was smiling curiously when he looked down at her at last.
“How sweet you are, Jane,” he said. “How very sweet! How many men have told you so?”
This time something didn’t prick at her, it stabbed at her.
“Do you think I make a habit of - allowing this sort of thing?”
“I don’t know.” He traced the outline of her feathery eyebrows, and the golden half-circles her brightly tipped eyelashes formed, with the tip of one slender little finger. “How should I know? We are strangers, you and I. We have never even been properly introduced!”
“No.”
“Not that that matters in these broad, comfortable, modern days. Years ago it would have been different. Years ago I wouldn’t have dared to do this after knowing you such an unbelievably short time. Certainly not here in France.”
“But I am English.”
“Yes, you are English. My little Anglo-Saxon!” He bent and touched his mouth to her lips again, and this time the pressure of his arms hurt her. She wanted to throw her own arms up and around his neck and hold him, but somehow she hadn’t the courage to do that, not even when the passion of his kiss began to burn her lips, and the closeness of it provided her with a wild, sweet sensation.
He looked down at her with eyes that were as black as mountain tarns on a moonless night, and amidst the blackness something leapt and played like lightning. “Tell me,” he insisted, “how many men have wanted to kiss you from the instant they saw you as I did?”
She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know. I’ve never bothered to find out. I’ve never wanted to find out.”
“But you have been kissed?”
“There are kisses and kisses,” that was all she could answer.
It didn’t satisfy him. “You have been in love?”
“Never,” she told him, and he drew back from her. There was a crease between his infinitely black brows. The look in his eyes was strange. “A lovely young woman like you must have been in love at some time or other! How old are you, Jane?”
“Twenty-five,” she told him.
“Twenty-five and not to have been in love! ... Not even slightly? But you must, Jane!”
“Very well, I must.” She sat back and felt strangely as if she had been fished out of a pool of water after being flung into it unexpectedly, and was still trying to make out what it was that had happened to her. “I was in love when I was fourteen with the dentist who attended to my teeth, and at sixteen I transferred that allegiance to a language-master at school. At twenty-one I was proposed to by a young bank-clerk who took me to tennis-club dances, and at twenty-three I mistook the attentions of a temporary employer - a - married man! - for something more serious, and imagined that I could fall in love with him! But luckily for me I didn’t! I got myself another job, and that led to my meeting yet another man at a cocktail-party who was looking for the ideal wife. Again - fortunately for me! - I was out of luck, and he married someone else, because his mother took an instantaneous dislike to me! I think that is the whole of my love-life to date, except for a Boy Scout - a Cub Master, I think he was - met on a channel crossing, who found me a rug when I was well nigh freezing to death, and later on brought me one of those bowls they keep handy to be sick in, because it turned very rough. We had dinner together in Brussels, and I never saw him again.”
Etienne put back his head and laughed so heartily that Jane regarded him with a certain amount of amazement. He recognized the amazement, but couldn’t stop laughing.
“Oh, Jane! You really are delightful,” he declared. And then, all at once, he sobered. “But, nevertheless, there were many opportunities for experience in that little history, and I’ve no doubt you profited by them. You kiss very beautifully.”
She felt the colour sting her face. “Shall we go back now?” she suggested. “It has been a very pleasant day, but I ought to get back.”
“Oh, Jane!” Instantly he was all contrition, and he buried his mouth in the palm of her hand. “I was teasing, of course, and it is obvious you are what is known as a very well-brought-up young woman, and I have no doubt you have quite a lot of very rigid principles.” But he regarded her a little speculatively just the same, and there was a gleam of humour in his eyes. “To me there is something rather irresistible about you, and I don’t want to take you back yet. Why must we cut short our time together?”
She looked away, and attempted to make her voice sound very dry as she said: “It would be unwise to enquire into your love-life, I imagine, Etienne. Probably very unwise.”
“Oh, very,” he agreed, and then chuckled. “The last thing I would recommend you to do, ma petite.” Then she felt his hand drawing her face round to his, and his eyes were very close to hers. The unbalanced thought flashed across her mind that it would be rather wonderful to drown in them, the dark, mystical, ironical depths that so fascinated her. “Kiss me, Jane,” he commanded, softly, and instantly she obeyed, her soft lips yielding to his with an eagerness that was very betraying.
For several long-drawn-out further minutes the world, and everything that was going on in the world, ceased to exist for her - and possibly also for him - and it was not until those warning bells started ringing again inside her head that she suddenly withdrew from his arms. He was obviously a past-master of the art of love-making, and although pliant as a reed while she determinedly prevented herself from thinking, the instant that warning telegraph system started to work she knew that they had stayed long enough in that green glade in the forest. She snapped open her handbag and produced a compact and repaired the ravages to her complexion, and while she was outlining her lips with lipstick he watched her with a tiny, smouldering fire in his eyes, and something that was much more inexplicable.
“Shall we go now?” she suggested, smiling, when the compact had been returned to her bag.
He, too, started to smile, and there was half-unwilling admiration in his eyes.
“If you wish. And if you feel that you have had enough of me for one day.”
“It has been a very pleasant day indeed, and I have th
oroughly enjoyed it.” she assured him, smiling even more brightly than before.
“Good,” he said, a dry note in his own voice this time. He started up the car, and on the return journey they neither of them seemed to have a great deal to say to one another. Etienne was definitely thoughtful, and Jane was feeling just a little sick inside. It was an unpleasant feeling, as if in spite of being cautioned she had deliberately scoffed up far too many rich pastries, and was now paying the penalty. She couldn’t think of anything to say, and she didn’t want to have him start a conversation and the thought that kept running through her mind had no direct bearing on what had just taken place between them, but was connected with her job and her employer, and she wanted to keep her fingers crossed in case - like so many random thoughts - there was a reason for the way in which it harried her.
Supposing - just supposing - Sandra had arrived unexpectedly at La Cause Perdue while she was out for the day!... It was the sort of thing Sandra would do, in spite of having telephoned twice to say that she was staying on in Paris, possibly even for another week.
Sandra wouldn’t have got as far as she had already got in her career if she hadn’t been extremely temperamental at times. And the last time she telephoned she had sounded a little peeved.
“Rene has left Paris - he wasn’t even here to greet me when I arrived! - and although I’ve met an awfully charming Vicomte, who sends me flowers every day, and waits on my hotel doorstep every morning, he’s just a little old ... And I was hoping that Rene would show me round! However, I don’t feel I’m going to be able to tear myself away just yet—”
But that was Sandra overnight, in the morning a new Sandra frequently took over, and dictated the moves for the day...
Enchanted Autumn Page 5
