Jasmine Harvest Page 13

  “And it was this that you considered to be the rankest injustice to Paul?”

  “Well, wasn’t it?”

  “I hope so. I believe so. But I’ve an idea this Mercier fellow only voiced what a lot of people have thought about Paul since I took over the control of Pascal. And ask yourself—before this latest peace-move of his, would you have been so ready to argue the odds in his favor?”

  “Yes, I should.”

  Berthin turned to smile at her. “I’m glad. That makes two of us. But why?”

  “Because—Well, I suppose because he was so genuinely angry about the risk of fire. If he hadn’t been, I think he would have been a lot more tolerant of Henri’s being drunk, and a good deal less violent about throwing him out. It was rather a blot on the evening, of course. But in a way it was—good to see, if you know what I mean?” Caroline appealed.

  Berthin nodded. “I know I should have been glad to see it,” he agreed, unaware that she had stopped short of describing another scene she would remember longer and valued more.

  ... Paul, proud of his heritage, wanting to show it to her in his own way ... Paul, describing the year’s natural cycle of life lovingly, vividly, giving the lie to his front of indifference to the affairs of the estate ... Paul, gathering an idle handful of jasmine flowers and then giving consummate care to dropping them one by one along her forearm; here, there, there—for all the world as if it mattered where each fell and rested.

  True, there was no reason against sharing this with Berthin too. But it was a wholesome, gentle memory of Paul which, she hoped would outlive the distaste of his kiss which had meant nothing to either of them, and she wanted to keep it to herself, sharing it with no one.

  As she had forseen, Betsy had telephoned Paul from Cannes with the same abortive result as before. So, short-sighted as it might be, it was good to console her with the news of his call on Berthin and the preoccupations which had kept him out and about the estate since.

  “You say he actually went to Berthin and volunteered to start pulling his weight?” Betsy puzzled.

  “So Berthin told me.”

  “But didn’t he think it pretty odd of Paul?”

  “I gather he didn’t look that particular gift horse in the mouth. They agreed on the work Paul should take over and it seems he has gone to it with a will. Even Berthin hasn’t seen him since.”

  “So he could really have been out whenever I’ve phoned? He hasn’t deliberately avoided me?”

  “I hope not.” said Caroline. But at that Betsy turned on her.

  “Do you? I wonder! By the way you’re always warning me against him. I should have thought you would be almost gratified if he were really dropping me flat,” she accused.

  Caroline said, “You know that’s not fair. But forget it. I meant I hoped that if he isn’t serious about you, he would be kinder than that about letting you know it. But even at the risk of ‘warning’ you yet again, I think you ought to know what Berthin read into this move of his.”

  Betsy nodded glumly. “You don’t have to tell me. I can guess. It’s his way of taking back the control from Berthin, knowing it will legally be his again soon? Yes, I thought as much—”

  She paused. Then, contrite, added, “I’m sorry, Caro, about ‘gratified.’ I do realize that you don’t want me to get hurt by banking on hopes I haven’t got if everyone is right and Paul is going to marry Ariane quite soon. But you see, I don’t mean to stay in doubt much longer. I promise you I won’t run after Paul. But the next time I see him I shall bring the talk round to Ariane and ask him straight out.”

  “And risk being roundly snubbed for your pains? I shouldn’t if I were you,” advised Caroline.

  Betsy’s chin went up. “Why not? After ... the other night, he couldn’t possibly slap me in the face by telling me to mind my own business; how could he?” she claimed.

  But she spoke without conviction, and Caroline guessed that if Paul were even only normally friendly and forthcoming with her, she would not risk putting the question which might resolve her doubts—the wrong way. Betsy would cling as long as she could to ignorance which she found comparative bliss; a smile, a gesture, a casual endearment, and she would again be head-in-sand blind to the little Paul meant by them. No, Betsy did not really want to know the truth of his relations with Ariane, and she was not alone in that. Deliberately ostrich-blind and deaf herself, Caroline did not want to know it either. Not until time and distance had dulled the memory of a scented night, dark, magical, and so still that a drift of jasmine-stars had lain where Paul’s hand had strewn them until he had brushed them away...

  In the next morning’s post there was a card for Caroline to say that a book she had ordered through Villon’s small bookshop was now to hand. It was the French translation of Edward Lear’s classic, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat; before leaving England she had seen it on display there and had since thought of it as a nice present for Simone Latour.

  She walked down into Villon to collect it, but had just paid for it and was waiting for it to be wrapped when she heard Simone herself asking for cooking-foil at a nearby stationery counter.

  Caroline took back the book from the assistant. “Don’t trouble. It is for Madame here,” she said, and took it over to Simone, who was loud with greetings and only momentarily dumbfounded with surprise at the gift.

  “For me? Le Hibou et La Pousiquette,” she read from its jacket. “But owls and cats do not—! Ah, I see it is a fairy story, and in les contes féeriques anything can happen—no? And you are giving it to me, Mademoiselle, because you know that I shall enjoy it with my dear Clementine in mind?”

  Caroline said, “Yes. It’s a humorous poem that most English children know and grown-ups enjoy too, and when I remembered it had been put into French I thought you would like to have a copy.”

  “You are too kind, Mademoiselle. I shall keep it always. I haven’t many books—Tch! A great old brown owl courting a pussy-cat—now there’s a droll thing!” chuckled Simone, stowing the slim volume into her shopping bag before completing her own purchases.

  They went out of the shop together. But under its sunblind Simone paused.

  “You did not look in at Clementine and her family on the night of Monsieur’s party?” she said, making a faint accusation of it.

  “No. You were very busy and I didn’t think I ought to ask you to show them to me,” said Caroline. “How are they getting on?”

  “Fast. Fast. Even Clementine, good mother that she is, is tiring of them a little, and that is a sign they must soon look about them for homes of their own. But you could see them for yourself, Mademoiselle, if you have nothing better to do than walk back with me to the house now?”

  Caroline hesitated. “Well—”

  “Monsieur Paul is out on business, but he will understand that I want you to see Clementine and her kittens again before we part from some of them. So will you come?” Simone urged.

  “All right, I’d like to.”

  Owing to the heat they took their leisurely time for the mile-long walk up through the plantations, talking cats and kittens most of the way. At the house they found Clementine was out about her own affairs. But the kittens, long since free of the confines of the music cupboard, were in clamorous evidence—tumbling each other until the lesser man screamed and decamped; flirting briefly with their toys, then abandoning them; washing spasmodically while planning fresh mischief and then, as suddenly as if they had been pole-axed, falling fast asleep, tiny terra-cotta noses buried in pepper-and-salt paws.

  Caroline was nursing one of these inert bundles when Simone returned from the kitchen, bringing iced citronade for her and saucers of bread and milk for any kittens who might be interested.

  Hands on ample knees, she stooped to peer at Caroline’s charge.

  “Ah, you have our little Benjamin there, Monsieur Paul’s favorite whom he insists we must keep when, the others go. For my part, I should have chosen that bold, bad Tarquin there. But this is how it is wit
h Monsieur Paul—his charity always for the ill-starred, the luckless one. It was the same when he was a little boy. Send him out with a pocketful of sous for his own spending and you could be very sure he would give most of them to some other gosselin who could pull the mouth that he had none!”

  Caroline stroked Benjamin’s tiny cranium with a single fingertip. “Then you knew Monsieur Pascal when he was a boy?” she asked.

  “I? But of course. I was scullerymaid in these kitchens before he was born. And that is the way it has been since the Pascals first came to the region—always at least one Latour, and often more, in their service. Not, you understand, Mademoiselle, that we Latours are the only ones with such a record. There are other families hereabouts who can boast as much. For example, the Malines, the Severins, even the Raguses until—” But there, at Caroline’s involuntary start, Simone broke off in confusion.

  “I am sorry, Mademoiselle! You know this name?”

  “Not looking up, Caroline said, “Yes.”

  “And you do not think it right to gossip of Monsieur Paul’s affairs with me? Bien entendu! One understands this, and I should not have let my tongue run away with me so. But indeed, indeed, Mademoiselle, if you are a friend of Monsieur’s, you should know that none of the Fanchon Raguse affair was what you think, nor as the world judged it at the time. Fanchon was a good girl—on that I would stake my life! And Monsieur Paul told them so at the inquiry, over and over again. But would they believe him? No! He had kept their rendezvous at his villa, hadn’t he? He had given her money, and who would say from all this but that she was cut from the same , shoddy cloth as her sister? Except Monsieur Paul, of course, and they would not listen to him.”

  Caroline said, “But if you are right and she wasn’t to blame, was there no one to speak for her except Monsieur Pascal? Hadn’t she parents or any relatives?”

  “No mother. A father, a ne’er-do-well who had been dismissed from the Pascal stables some months earlier; this sister Aricie, who had not shown her face in the region since she ran away with a married man three years before. Nobody else. No one at all. Raguse pere had already slunk out of Villon before the inquest and wasn’t to be found after it. But I—I, Simone Latour, know there was nothing wrong between Fanchon and Monsieur Paul, and I could not say more if she were my own daughter, could I?”

  “I don’t think you could,” Caroline assured her.

  “Yes, well—” Simone began to busy herself collecting used saucers and ragged newspaper balls from the floor—“naturally Monsieur has never spoken of this to me and I know my place better than to bring it up with him. So perhaps, Mademoiselle, you won’t think it necessary to tell him I drew you into gossip about it?”

  “Of course I shan’t.”

  “Thank you, Mademoiselle.”

  As Caroline rose, putting the sleeping, still furled kitten into the chair she had vacated, Simone straightened and faced her.

  “It is simply, you see, that there are too many people ready to judge Monsieur Paul. And if he is too proud or too loyal to the dead to speak for himself, someone must do it for him, even if it is left to an old woman who knows him for the family man he really is—the best, the most generous and lovable in the world,” she declared, stating a faith in Paul which Caroline’s heart echoed in defiance of her head’s bleak reasoning against it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WALKING down to the villa, Caroline had almost reached it when she met Paul’s car coming up. The last time she had seen him had been at the end of his party when she and Betsy had called their good nights and thanks from the fringe of a crowd about him and Ariane, and with the memory of their previous tart exchange still rankling, she would have liked more warning before meeting him now.

  At sight of her he braked and opened the car door in invitation. But she shook her head, closed it and stood against it as she said, “I’m only on my way home,” and told him what her errand had been.

  He nodded. “Sorry that, like Clementine, I wasn’t in,” he said. “I’ve been over in Grasse, press-ganging an almost non-existent float of labor into the job of cleaning up Fragonard. Yesterday I combed the region from end to end for jasmine pickers whom everyone else wants at the same time. The day before that—But I daresay you’ve heard from Berthin about the prodigal’s return, haven’t you?”

  Caroline looked him straight in the eye. “Yes, Berthin told me when he took me over to Grasse yesterday.”

  “And you said, ‘Well, there now! Who’d have thought he would be quite so quick on the draw?’ Because of course you realize it was all your doing?”

  “My doing? You didn’t mention me to Berthin! You told him—That is, he thought—” She broke off, her color flaring.

  Paul grinned. “Cousin B. shouldn’t overwork his intuition. Of course it was the doing of your pep talk on the cultivation of goodwill—what else?”

  Caroline said, “If I remember rightly, you didn’t seem to think much of the suggestion at the time. ‘Dreary’ was the description you used.”

  “Well, you can’t deny it was a bit off-beat in a romantic setting I’d gone to some trouble to create? Warm velvet darkness, perfume-drenched, and all that. ‘The time, the place and the—’ But no, we shouldn’t agree that that applies. However, on the principle of ‘You never know’ and feeling I had nothing to lose by a deathbed repentance, I decided to have a stab at an honest day’s toil. Hence my call on Berthin more or less at first light the next morning, and now I can only hope my zeal will be appreciated in the right quarter—How’s Betsy?”

  Caroline was glad to accept the abrupt change of subject.

  “She was worried when she couldn’t get you by phone, but she has been happier since she has known you really weren’t there when she rang,” she told him.

  “But that doesn’t let me out, does it? I could have rung her back.” Crooking an arm across the steering-wheel, he turned in his seat to face Caroline fully. “I haven’t been so very clever about young Betsy, have I? I hadn’t realized she didn’t know all the rules. So where do I go from here, Betsy-wise? I’m asking your advice, Caro. I really want it.”

  It was the first time he had used Betsy’s pet name for her, and she warmed to it and to the rare gravity of his tone.

  She said slowly, “It’s difficult to know how you’re to backpedal on making love to her as you did. You mustn’t drop her flat, because that—hurts too much, and yet I’m afraid she may read more than you mean into even ordinary friendliness. Perhaps the kindest way would be for you to hint that you know now she’s as good as engaged to Edward Brant, and blame yourself for rushing her.”

  He agreed, “Yes, that’s it. Though I daresay you would rather she didn’t hear that it was you who had told on her?”

  Caroline nodded. “Please not.”

  “She shan’t,” he promised. “The way I’ll work it, she will tell me. And from there on I’ll play to a cue of apology, of renunciation, of suggesting I hope she’ll let me be a brother to her—hm?”

  “I suppose so. But, Paul, don’t guy it!” Caroline begged. “She’s so deadly in earnest about you, and it’s so cruelly easy to—”

  He cut her short with a hand laid over hers where it rested on the edge of the door; briefly the eyes which looked into hers were as serious as she could have asked.

  “Don’t worry, Caro. I’ll be kind,” he said.

  That evening he telephoned, asking for Betsy. She was a long time talking to him, laughing a good deal, and when she rang off she told Caroline,

  “It’s all right. He was as sweet as ever. It was simply that he’s been tied up with this latest caper of his, as you said. I asked him what the idea was and he said he was keeping his hand in, just in case. But when I said, ‘In case of what?’ he said, ‘Fishing—huh?’, which could have meant anything, so when he changed the subject, I let him. He wanted to know if we’d care to go jasmine gathering, just for the fun of it; I said yes for you as well. Was that all right?”

  'Caroline said,
“Yes, of course. I haven’t a clue as to how to go about it, but I’d like to try. When do we start?”

  “Tomorrow morning at the most ghastly hour. Five o’clock, no less! I said to Paul, ‘Have a heart!’ But apparently it’s dawn or nothing with jasmine, and when he said he would act as knocker-up and transport as well if we liked, I said O.K. Besides, there’s one thing I’d go to town on—know what? That dear Ariane won’t show up at five o’clock in the morning on a jasmine plantation, which suits me just fine,” Betsy concluded with satisfaction.

  They set the alarm of her travelling clock for four-thirty and were both waiting for Paul when he came to call for them. On the way down to a plantation off the Villon road he told them they would be paid the rate for the job according to the weight of flowers they picked.

  “How many ought we to be able to pick in a morning?” they wanted to know.

  “It depends on the yield, but you won’t do so badly if you manage something over a kilogram apiece,” said Paul.

  “Only a kilogram between now and noon? Are we stopping to string them into daisy chains or something?” exclaimed Betsy.

  He laughed. “My pet, a really skilled picker has her work cut out to pop four kilograms in seven hours! Around eight thousand flowers go to the kilo, and though that may mean nothing to you this side of your first trayful—believe me, it will! So I’ll settle for about three kilos between you, and I shan’t cry shame if you do a lot less.”

  They began to gather by the half-light of the sun struggling for mastery of the cold mist. But half an hour or so, and the sun had won; striking at first in long bars from behind the mountain tops and then in a burst of radiance above them.

  The pickers were spaced out, so many to a row, each of which appeared to stretch to a horizon which might as well have been infinity. They gathered into shallow baskets slung on their arms, at intervals emptying into the larger panniers placed at strategic points. The work had to be done in the most tiring position known to gardeners—at a half-stoop which set unaccustomed backbones pleading for mercy.