‘It is not suitable,’ was all she replied when Diana raised the subject, and that was that. But Maxine was far less formal with Stella, embracing her, kissing her cheeks, and asking whether she wanted her lesson in le salon or by la piscine.
‘Oh the pool, the pool,’ cried Stella, and the two of them hurried down the stairs that led to the pool terrace outside.
‘Wear a hat and be careful not to burn,’ Diana called from the salon, but her daughter was gone. Distant giggles floated up from the stairwell.
Diana’s gaze fell on the photograph of James and John on the mantelpiece. Stella was the image of James; it was odd how firstborns so often took after their fathers. She had inherited James’s piercing blue eyes, straight nose and ironic smile. And the resemblance was not just physical: the child had many of her father’s mannerisms, including his tendency, when he wished to make a particular point, to lower his voice rather than raise it.
Diana saw James in her daughter every single day.
She sighed, picked up her keys and handbag, and left by the front door, remembering to double-lock it behind her. One of the things the guidebooks had carefully omitted to say was that petty crime and burglary were common all along the Côte d’Azur. The villa’s previous occupant had been vociferous on the point.
‘The li’l bastards come in through the front door when you’re down by the pool,’ he said. ‘So you have to lock the door, even when there’s folks in the house. They even come in through an open window when you’re having lunch or supper or suchlike in another room. That’s why I had to put these goddamn bars all over the place. One night after supper I came into the kitchen and one of the li’l bastards had his head in the fridge. But he was too quick for me – back out of the window like a scalded cat.’
He swung his golf club. ‘That’s why I walk around with this thing. Next time it happens I’ll be ready!’
Diana walked down the paved drive that opened onto the single-track lane leading to St Paul de Vence. She pressed the concealed button on her side of the electric gate and it slid slowly open on its runners. She walked through and a few moments later heard it quietly rumble back into place behind her.
St Paul was less than five minutes’ walk away. As she rounded a screen of cyprus trees, the village came into view on her left. In some ways it reminded her of Hever Castle. Like her home village in Kent, St Paul was defined by its massive fortifications. It crouched on a steep hill, enclosed by a colossal medieval wall topped with ramparts. The village houses clustered within, like sheep in a pen. Narrow streets rose steeply to St Paul’s crown jewel, the fifteenth-century church with its tall, sleek belltower of pale stone. Diana had yet to climb the tower but she had heard that the views from the top were breathtaking: to the north, the Alps, to the south, the glittering sea; Africa hidden below the distant blue-hazed horizon.
She walked through the remains of the outer fortifications and into the main square, where already local men were playing boules outside the Café de la Place, the village’s principal meeting-point. Others sat at the café’s tables along its shady terrace, reading newspapers and sipping small glasses of beer.
Diana couldn’t understand how anyone could drink anything stronger than coffee at nine in the morning, but here it was routine. She watched a waiter delivering a tray bearing three glasses of wine and what looked like two small cognacs to a group of women at an end table. They were off-duty hotel cleaners, dressed in pink pinafores and caps, their mops stacked neatly against the café’s wall.
No wonder so many people here succumb to cirrhosis of the liver, Diana thought as she walked across the square to the taxi-rank on the far side. The driver of the car at the head of the line saw her coming and stubbed out his cigarette.
‘Oui, madame?’
‘Bonjour, monsieur. Nice, please. The Cours Saleya.’
‘Mon plaisir, madame.’
She saw him looking at her legs as she climbed into the back of the cab and sighed inwardly. The man must be seventy, if he was a day.
The Cours Saleya was the street that bisected Nice’s Old Town, just behind the eastern end of the Promenade des Anglais. All the city’s best restaurants and cafés were there, many of them clustered around the old flower-market, where Diana was headed. She came here almost every morning. It had become something of a ritual for her. She would read the local paper, listen to the conversations that flowed and pulsed around her, and thus improve her French.
Even by the time she got there, well before ten o’clock, most of the day’s business would be over. Stallholders were busy hosing down the cobbles around their pitches, and many were preparing to meet up at one of the cafés for a stupendous, and very early, lunch. If one had been up and working since before three in the morning, the stomach decreed that lunch should be taken no later than half past ten.
The taxi dropped her off at the Opera House and she walked the rest of the way, keeping to the shady side of the street. The sun was properly up now and she didn’t want her make-up to run.
Sure enough, the flower-market was pretty much done for the day when she arrived. For a few centimes, she managed to buy an enormous bouquet of pink and white lilies just before they were tossed into the back of the trader’s evilly smoking diesel flatbed Ford – at this time of day stallholders were practically giving away what remained of their stock – and crossed the road to her favourite pavement café.
The patron looked up from his newspaper as Diana stepped up onto the low wooden terrace which kept customers’ feet dry when the market was being hosed down, and waved to her. He’d grown fond of the beautiful Englishwoman who had been coming to his café for the past month. She looked enchanting this morning, he thought, carrying her flowers and manoeuvring her way delicately between the little tables to her usual place. He half-wished he had bought the bouquet for her, before reminding himself he was a married man on the wrong side of fifty and long past such foolishness.
He was in the habit of greeting Diana each morning with a little joke, which he insisted on delivering in heavily accented English.
‘Bonjour, madame!’
‘Bonjour, Armand – go on, then.’
The café-owner mopped his bald head with a pristine white handkerchief, which he replaced in the front pocket of his apron. Then he folded his hands carefully over a round belly, his waxed and pointed moustache twitching as his mouth made a little moue of excitement.
‘Alors . . .’ He gathered himself theatrically, tilted his head back and announced: ‘Last night, I tell my wife I have bought the dog with no nose.’
He cantilevered his body sideways from the waist, swivelled inwards and adopted a simpering expression.
‘Oh Armand,’ he quavered in a falsetto, ‘but how does this dog smell?’
He snapped back into position. ‘Completely terrible, my dear!’
Diana laughed despite herself. ‘Armand, that joke probably arrived here with the Romans.’
He nodded. ‘Absolument. And they left it here especially for you, madame. Now, I get your café and le journal.’
A few minutes later, Diana put down her copy of Nice-Matin. She had heard somewhere that no newspaper, however worthy, printed more than a thousand different words in any one edition. She was certainly finding it progressively easier to understand Nice’s morning paper; her French vocabulary was steadily growing.
She loved this morning routine. The smell of cut flowers lingered on the warm air, and every now and then a passing stallholder would give her a little wave of recognition. She felt completely at home here, and was surprised not to have experienced even a trace of homesickness since arriving in Provence.
It had been a vile journey down. England was in the grip of yet another freezing winter when they left – almost as bad as the one of 1947–48. The pipes in her house had burst the night before she left and the new tenants – Diana had decided to keep her cottage after marrying Douglas, and was renting it out – had been furious.
‘H
aven’t you heard of lagging?’ shouted the young husband down the phone the next morning. ‘This is 1951. There’s no excuse for burst pipes these days, you know.’
In between marshalling trunks and cases in the hall of Douglas’s Kensington mansion, looking for her passport which had inexplicably gone missing, and reminding Douglas to bring the envelope stuffed with high-denomination French banknotes from the safe, Diana had somehow managed to organise a plumber to go to Hever. Then came news that there was a rail strike, and three taxis had to be booked to take them and their luggage to Dover. They got there too late for the last ferry and ended up having to stay in a horrible hotel for the night. Diana had forgotten the family’s ration cards so their last meal in England had been one of stale bread, a suspicious omelette made with what she was certain was wartime-vintage powdered egg, and staggeringly weak tea laced with milk that was definitely on the turn.
Next day they arrived, famished and exhausted, at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. They boarded the waiting Nice train, and as it was lunchtime, walked straight to the dining car. By the time they were leaving the Paris suburbs behind, Diana was enjoying what she, Douglas and Stella agreed was probably the best meal of their lives. If there was food rationing in France, it didn’t extend to the first-class express from Paris to Nice. Goose pâté with warm brioche had been followed by tender flash-fried steak served on potato slices lightly tossed with rosemary, with freshly made crème brûlée to finish. Wine, brought without being ordered, was a light, fresh rosé from Provence. Stella had some with mineral water, and summed up the general feeling as coffee, again unasked for, was served.
‘That felt like a dream.’
Indeed it had. In fact, reflected Diana as she finished her coffee and prepared to leave the café, Nice displayed none of the kind of post-war privations that shivering, flat-broke Britain was still experiencing. A telephone conversation with her father the night before had left her with the distinct impression that things there were getting worse, not better. ‘You wouldn’t think we’d won the bloody war,’ he said gloomily.
She must invite her parents down to stay, Diana decided as she stood up. They’d love it here and the light would be perfect for her mother’s painting. She’d phone them today to arrange it all.
She’d hated saying goodbye, back in March. Gwen had insisted that the three of them come to the Dower House for a farewell Sunday lunch, two days before they left for France.
It had not been a happy occasion. Douglas and Oliver respected each other but could never seem to quite hit it off. Douglas had a tendency to become stiff and formal when in Mr Arnold’s presence – he told Diana he simply couldn’t help it – and Oliver’s attempts at humour usually fell on stony ground.
So lunch had been a stilted affair, the imminent departure hanging like a cloud over all of them. Her parents had tried to put on a brave face, but it was obvious they were going to miss their daughter and granddaughter enormously. Diana had formed the closest of bonds with her mother and father after John and James were killed. Not at once; in fact, during the year after the double tragedy, Diana had sometimes wondered if her parents might separate, so isolated from each other by grief were they. She herself was beyond comfort or solace; for a miserable few months the Arnolds barely spoke to each other.
The arrival of Stella had changed all that.
Diana left a few coins on the table for her coffee and walked out onto the pavement.
A taxi came slowly round the corner, past a little grove of lemon trees that lined the centre of the road. It was a shabby brown prewar Citroën, all the windows down in the spring warmth. She stood up to hail it, but realised it already carried a passenger and wasn’t going to stop.
As it passed her, she saw the silhouette of a man sitting in the back. He was leaning forward and speaking, in English, to the driver.
‘No, not here. I told you – it’s much further up. Keep going all the way to the Hotel Negresco. And get a move on – I’m late enough as it is.’
Diana swayed and gripped the back of her chair. Impossible.
‘Stop!’ she called at last as the taxi reached the top of the square and began to turn on to the Promenade des Anglais. ‘Oh please, stop!’
But the Citroën entered the flow of traffic and disappeared down the long curving road that bordered the sparkling Mediterranean.
‘Madame?’ It was Armand, the patron, solicitous. ‘Do you have a problem?’
‘No, no . . .’ She sat down again. ‘Everything’s fine, really.’
But she was lying.
Everything was wrong.
Completely wrong.
Tentatively, Armand touched her shoulder. ‘Madame, are you quite yourself?’ he asked in a low voice. The Englishwoman’s sudden pallor alarmed him.
Diana wheeled round. ‘I know that man,’ she stated.
‘Who, madame? The man in the taxi?’
‘Yes. I’m sure of it. But he can’t be . . . I can’t have . . .’ Diana looked back at the point where the taxi had disappeared, before turning to the concerned patron again. ‘Did you hear him, Armand? Did you hear him speak?’
The man shook his head, his pointed moustache ends quivering. ‘Non, madame. I only heard you cry out.’
‘He was speaking English. I know his voice. Knew it, rather.’
‘I see. And who is this man?’ Armand sat down beside Diana. The other clients had barely looked up; they were busy smoking, talking, eating and drinking.
Diana looked into Armand’s kind face. How to answer him? She hesitated.
‘I think – I think he is someone I once knew. Knew rather well, in fact.’
Armand stared at her, now more curious than concerned. ‘Oui, madame, as you say . . . but forgive me, you seem to be not quite yourself. Is there anything I can do?’
Diana shook her head. ‘No, I’m quite all right, really I am.’ She touched her temple. ‘I think I must have a touch of the sun, that’s all.’
‘Perhaps madame should go home and rest, non?’
‘Yes, that would be best. Thank you, Armand. Vous êtes très gentil. À demain.’
‘À demain, madame.’
Diana somehow managed to walk away from the café with a semblance of normality, but she felt as though her legs might give way at any moment. Then she heard Armand calling after her.
‘Your flowers, madame!’ He was waving the lilies in the air. ‘You have forgotten them!’
She gave a weak smile. ‘You keep them, Armand. Put them in a vase on your counter. That way, we can all enjoy them.’
He shrugged and went back inside his café.
Only after Diana had turned the corner where the taxi had disappeared did she stop, and lean heavily against the building. Her head really did begin to throb now, and quite suddenly she felt violently ill. She mustn’t be sick here, she simply mustn’t. After a few moments she was able to walk on, taking deep breaths and fighting to quell the nausea that gripped her.
It wasn’t until she saw the distinctive dome of the hotel half a mile away that the obvious course of action presented itself.
‘The Negresco,’ she told the first taxi driver to stop. ‘As quickly as you can.’
The driver shrugged, and indicated the heavy traffic. ‘It will take me a few minutes, madame.’
Diana didn’t hear him. She was listening to that voice, over and over again, in her head. ‘. . . Hotel Negresco. And get a move on – I’m late enough as it is.’
The same clipped drawl; the same hint of London accent under the vowels – the confident, slightly arrogant tone of a man used to getting his own way.
James. Her James.
She had never been so certain of anything in her life.
The Hotel Negresco’s lobby was crammed with Americans that morning, fresh off a cruise liner that could be seen towering above the harbour tucked in behind St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.
The hotel’s interior design veered wildly from Art Deco to Louis XIII. Today, the lobby was also
stuffed with potted palms, an experiment by the current manager. It made the place look even more crowded.
Diana fought her way through to the reception desk. She caught a glimpse of her face in the gilded mirror behind it, and barely recognised herself. Her hair was in disarray; she had been unconsciously running her hands through it while her taxi made its agonisingly slow progress along the Promenade. There was a wild look in her eyes, and under the tan her face looked almost grey.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for someone. A man.’
The smooth, café au lait-skinned receptionist behind the counter raised his eyebrows. ‘But of course, madame. Which man?’
Diana paused. It seemed ridiculous, now that she was going to have to say it aloud. Perhaps she should just leave. Then she mentally replayed that clipped drawl, which kept repeating itself over and over inside her head.
She took a deep breath. ‘His name is – was . . .’ Still she hesitated. ‘He’s an Englishman. He would have arrived here by taxi a few minutes ago. He was wearing a hat – a Fedora, I think.’
‘Oui, madame – but his name?’
Diana closed her eyes for a moment. ‘James Blackwell. His name is James Blackwell.’
There. She had said it. Diana felt a wave of vertigo sweep through her and she swayed slightly.
‘One moment, please.’
The receptionist opened the reservations book in front of him and ran a slim finger down the page.
‘Non. This gentleman is not staying with us at the Negresco.’ He clicked his fingers and a bell-boy in a smart blue and gold uniform and pill-box hat hurried over.
‘Marcel! Cherchez un Monsieur Blackwell. Dans le restaurant, ou le bar . . . vite!’
The boy scurried off, and the man smiled at Diana. ‘ If this monsieur is here, we will find him for you. He is a friend, yes?’
‘Yes, he is. A close friend.’
Some Day I'll Find You Page 13
