Jasmine Harvest Read online

  “So! La petite Neville! After so long a time absent!” Pere Chaussin, aproned and beaming, had opened ecstatic arms to her and so had Mère Chaussin, pressing Caroline to her ample frontage while showering questions over her head.

  “And the good Monsieur Neville—he is with you, no? What—dead two years? Hélas, this brief life! But that makes you orpheline—you already had no mother living, one recalls? And you, Mademoiselle—you are not married? Nor fiancée! On holiday in Paris? Passing through? Or returned to us perhaps for good?”

  But before Caroline had satisfied their curiosity a bottle of wine had had to be opened. Then she must lunch at their invitation and expense. No, no demur! This was an occasion! Here at the staff table, screened from the other patrons, they would all eat together—pâté de maison, omelette aux fines herbes, escalopes de veau—and over the meal she should hear their news and must tell hers.

  Their memory of Caroline and her father had needed little refreshing.

  But yes—understood! Monsieur Neville had come to Paris as the branch manager of an English tourist agency and after three years had returned to good promotion in London. Meanwhile Mademoiselle had been a pupil at the Lycée Scarron—no? So plump and bouncing a child she had been, yet how slim and chic now! Regard then the grey eyes, the silver-fair hair, the palely flushed skin that was so English, and remember that gesture, will you? There—that thrust of the forefinger lifting the wing of hair from the brow! Always, but always she made it when she was excited or pleased, and now that we are so happy to see her again—look, she does it now!

  Thus Pere and Mère Chaussin in turns before Caroline brought her personal story up to date. They clucked with sympathy over her father’s sudden death on the evening of her twenty-first birthday and extracted her promise that on her return, however, indefinite, from her present errand she would spend longer in Paris than she planned to do now.

  It was not until mid-afternoon that the meal had ended and she had gone on to make some briefer calls on places and people they insisted she must see again. Then she had gone shopping for a present for each of them and, returning to Le Chat Gris, had found herself the centre of interest for as many more mutual friends as the Chaussins had managed to collect during her absence.

  Later still—“An revoir! An revoir!” had echoed after her taxi as its driver accepted the challenge of doing the cross-city journey to the Gare de Lyon in fifteen minutes if she were to catch the train at eight. But he made it and so had she, thank goodness, and she knew she would not have missed the day’s heartwarming experience for worlds.

  How kind French people were—leaping to congratulate you on the most halting command of their language and praising your “chic” to the skies if you looked only ordinarily neat! Which reminded her—she could do with some freshening as soon as her right to this compartment or some other was settled, and meanwhile she saw no reason why she shouldn’t use the mirror opposite for doing some running repairs...

  But as she stood up the train took some particularly vicious points; caught off-balance, Caroline hurtled first towards the table, then towards the open door where, missing her grip on the jamb, she would have plunged into the corridor if a man’s hands had not steadied her—and lingered on her upper arms a fraction longer than was necessary.

  She looked up—quite a long way up—into a lean, tanned face, meeting eyes that held a hint of controlled devilment beneath oddly crooked brows some shades darker than the hair. Still breathless and not knowing if she were choosing the right language, ‘I—I do beg your pardon, Monsieur,” she said in French.

  “Thinking nothing of it, Mademoiselle. A pleasure, believe me!” The words were conventional enough. It was the smile that went with them which seemed to underline the opportunism of the hold which had lasted just too long, and instinctively Caroline froze as she stepped back into the compartment.

  But after a second’s hesitation and a glance at the number on the door, her rescuer was inside it too—and so was the debonair smile, easy and very sure of its charm. Rocking slightly on his heels to the train’s movement, he asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you, Mademoiselle? If so—enchanted, believe me!”

  “Nothing, thank you, Monsieur. Nothing more, that is—”

  He was looking at her case, standing on the seat. “You were on your way to your own reservation, no doubt, when that lurch of the train threw you against the door?”

  He must have known she hadn’t been carrying her case and that she had been inside the compartment, not passing by! She said, “No, I was on my feet in here and lost my balance. I—” But there it occurred to her that as he seemed to assume he had a right to be where he was, then he must think she hadn’t. Giving his brash assurance the benefit of the doubt, she went on,

  “These things, Monsieur—” indicating the oddments on the table and implying the valise on the rack—“they’re not yours, by any chance?”

  His glance followed hers. “Mine, yes. Guilty, I’m afraid.” The smile widened to a grin for which the only description was impish. ‘May I take it then, Mademoiselle, that if you were in here, you had been offended by the litter as you passed, and had dropped in to tidy it up?”

  Thrust by his raillery on to an offensive she hadn’t meant to take, Caroline retorted, “Of course not. But if they are yours, I’m afraid there has been some mistake.”

  “What kind of a mistake?” he inquired conversationally. “And whose? Tell me—yours? Or mine?”

  Less sure of her ground than she hoped she sounded, Caroline said, ‘That remains to be seen. But as my reservation is for Coach Four, Compartment Six, the mistake could be yours or your travel agent’s, Monsieur.”

  “Even if my reservation is for Compartment Six, Coach Four?”

  “It can’t very well be, can it, if mine is?”

  ‘Ah, but it could be, if yours is something different. Equally it could be, supposing you hadn’t troubled to make a reservation at all and were relying on your charm and my chivalry to get you a place!”

  Outraged, Caroline blanched. “How dare you suggest such a thing?” she demanded. “And as if anyone would dream of travelling for—for eleven hours by night without reserving a berth!”

  ‘Eleven hours?” Head cocked, he appeared to calculate her probable destination. Aloud he said smoothly, “It has—happened, when trains must be caught at the last moment. And you see, Mademoiselle, it didn’t escape my notice from the window of the bar that your canter down the platform was perilously close to zero-hour!”

  Almost speechless with chagrin at the thought of the figure of fun she and her bumping case must have cut, Caroline said frostily, “And of course you couldn’t know I was directed here by a porter as well as by the ticket inspector after they had both looked at my voucher? If you don’t believe me—”

  But as she opened her handbag in search of her wallet, someone else—the coach attendant—was in the doorway, and from the nod the two men exchanged, clearly they had met earlier.

  “You find everything to your liking, Monsieur?”

  Eyes on Caroline—“Everything, thank you, so far as I am concerned. It is Madame here who is not pleased!”

  “Madame?” The attendant’s brows knitted. “But?”

  “A slight contretemps, I’m afraid. You see, Madame believes this compartment to be hers.”

  “But no, Monsieur—impossible, that. I myself checked your vouchers when you boarded. A mistake somewhere. Madame, you would allow me to see your reservation.”

  “Willingly.” Caroline took false confidence when his face cleared after examining it.

  But he addressed her companion, not her. “Ah, simple! Remain just where you find yourself, Monsieur. It is Madame’s mistake, not yours!”

  Caroline protested, “But this is Number Six and the coach is—”

  “Number Four, First Class Wagon-Lits, Madame. It is in Coach Four of the Second Class where you will find your couchette reserved, and one wonders that you should ev
er have supposed—”

  Too late Caroline remembered the ticket inspector’s warning which she had not waited to hear. But that porter, knowing she was wrong, simply hadn’t troubled to put her right! Hoping she did not look as crestfallen as she felt, she glanced at both men, seeing official disapproval in the one face, quizzical amusement in the other.

  Her chin jerked up. “I’m very sorry. I thought I was properly directed here,” she said with as much grace as she could muster. They could believe her or not as they pleased, and though she was tempted to add a trenchant word or two on the subject of the duplication of coach numbering, she decided there was no future in prolonging the spectacle of her defeat. But when she reached for her case she met her fellow passenger’s hand on its handle.

  Again that impish grin. “I’m to be forgiven, Mademoiselle, for the awful crime of being in the right?”

  “Of course.” How she loathed him for rubbing it in!

  “Then we’ll drink to our ‘pax.’ You must join me in the restaurant bar.”

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur—but no.” If he had not made a statement of it rather than an invitation, and if from the first he had not laid on assurance with a palette knife, she thought she, would have accepted. But as it was she sensed he would not take “No” unless she spelt it for him, and she was relieved when the attendant intervened, addressing her companion in rapid undertones. That is, she was relieved until she caught the gist of the argument...

  “A rule of the railway, Monsieur—none of my making.”

  “Pff—not to be borne! Even a nationalized railway must have a heart, a sense of the romantic somewhere!”

  “Perhaps, but it is not for me to say. The second class has a restaurant and a bar of its own, and it is not permitted—”

  “Nevertheless, it could be arranged?”

  A pause. A shrug. A man-between-man smile spreading over the attendant’s face. “But yes, it could be—arranged, Monsieur!”

  But at the crackle of franc-notes passing from hand to hand Caroline rebelled in earnest. The—the effrontery of the man—trying to buy for her the doubtful privilege of spending any more time at all in his company! She addressed him first. “Please don’t trouble yourself, Monsieur. You should believe I meant my refusal of your invitation.” Then to the attendant, “Perhaps you’ll show me to my own place as soon as you are free?”

  “Certainly, Madame. At once.” Taking her case, he ushered her ahead of him into the corridor, but himself indulged a final exchange with the other man.

  “A thousand pities, Monsieur. The little matter could have arranged itself with ease, had Madame shown herself agreeable!”

  A maddening chuckle. “If she had been agreeable! And when a lady is not willing, what should one do next, my friend?”

  “Monsieur is asking me?”

  “Monsieur is.”

  “Then—nothing, Monsieur. Me, in such a situation, I merely snap the fingers and reflect that for one who says no there are many who will say yes and that, like the trains in the Metro, another will be coming along—”

  But already, not waiting to hear the reply to that stale quip, Caroline was stalking away down the corridor, out of earshot of what it might be.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AS soon as her couchette was made up Caroline had been ready to use it, and during the night had heard only the noisy stops at Dijon and Lyon. Waking finally to a misty dawn at Marseille, she dressed and packed her night things, and from then until she went to the restaurant car for breakfast, sat watching the towering brown peaks of the Maure massif gradually wheel back and give place to a coastline and countless tiny bays, pine-fringed and sapphire-floored, and of as many magic names.

  ... Le Lavandou ... St. Tropez ... St. Raphael ... Le Trayas ... Miramar ... Too soon for Caroline, needing time to absorb such prodigality of light and warmth and color, it was Cannes, and there, a little apart from the crowd on the platform, was Betsy, searching the length of the train with her eyes as it drew alongside.

  Caroline waved and Betsy replied with a lifted thumb of welcome. Owl-eyed in extravagant dark glasses and on the merest nodding terms with decency in a sailcloth halter-top and briefs, she looked as “with” her background as a chameleon. By contrast Caroline felt “new girl” and overdressed in sleeveless white cotton, and when they met and had exchanged a cousinly kiss, Betsy’s greeting underlined the superiority lent by her tan of the color and patina of boot polish.

  “Lovely to see you, Caro! But my!”—holding Caroline at arm’s length—“At home, do we really go about looking quite so wan? You’re going to have to oil like mad, though it doesn’t take too long to cook, thank goodness. I mean, by now I’m quite passable, aren’t I?”

  “More than!” approved Caroline. “Positively negroid, and I can’t wait to compete. But I probably can’t, being so much fairer than you to begin with.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Betsy’s tone implied that she could afford to be generous. “I know I’ve a month’s start on you, but when you blonde characters tan you usually go a super goldy-brown that knocks ’em in the aisles.” As a porter snatched Caroline's luggage Betsy added, “You know, Caro, I couldn’t be more glad to see you. Because, as I knew the parents wouldn’t wear the idea of my staying on here alone indefinitely, Mummy might have sent almost anyone. So you can imagine the hoot of sheer relief I gave when she rang to say she had managed not to tell Daddy yet and that she had asked you to come.”

  Caroline said dryly, “Thanks, it’s nice to be regarded as the least of the evils which might have been wished on you! But though I mightn’t have been so biddable if I hadn’t been thinking in terms of France for a holiday in any case, it all worked out. Not, however, that that lets you out, young Betsy, for putting Aunt Clio on the spot as you did. You must have known how worried she would be, and what is it all in aid of, anyway?”

  Betsy halted on their way down the platform. “Look, Caro, you’re not putting on a governess act already, are you?” she demanded.

  “No, but I do expect to be put in the picture, and so do Aunt Clio and Uncle Ralph,” Caroling warned.

  “Well, you will be,” Betsy allowed reluctantly. “But it’s—quite a story and it can wait, can’t it? Meanwhile—” she moved on again—“do you really want to go straight up to the villa, or will you settle for spending the morning down here and going back around siesta time, when I promise to take down my back hair and Tell All?”

  The emphasis on “really” being a clear indication of Betsy’s wishes in the matter, Caroline agreed that she would like nothing better than a morning in Cannes. “What do we use for transport?” she asked.

  “Hire-drive bubble car. I kept it on after Tom and Ann left. With three in it, one of us always had to sit bodkin, but it’s all right for two; it is a bit temperamental at times, but it’s quite a lamb at skipping up and down hills, and believe you me, around here it needs to be!”

  They were outside in the station square now; at Betsy’s direction the porter loaded Caroline’s bags into the tiny car; Caroline tipped him and then Betsy, taking the driving seat, was waiting for Caroline to join her.

  But Caroline lingered, her eyes searching the panorama of the sun-drenched square—the milling crowds, the porters’ trolleys, the taxis, the cars—for long enough to rouse Betsy’s impatience to be gone.

  “What gives, Caro?” she asked, leaning across and craning her head. “Why the glassy-eyed stare? Realized you’ve lost your passport? Left something in the train? If not, what are you looking at? Or for?”

  “What?” Why, nothing. Nothing at all. Just—looking,” said Caroline. But her fingers had to cross against the white lie, schoolgirl-fashion, as she jack-knifed into the car.

  Betsy’s finishing school had equipped her with most of the social arts and skills; she drove as well as she danced and rode and swam, and she had taken to the Continental rule of the road with her usual confidence.

  For Caroline’s benefit they first made a tour of the
principal shopping streets and then followed the long curve of the Croisette from the Pointe to the port and the yacht-basin, where the world’s most leisured shipping, dallying at anchor on the blue glass floor, was as much a part of the Riviera glamor story as the Croisette’s palms and canna lilies, its mammoth hotels and luxury boutiques. And though here the bustle and the nautical noises and the smells might just possibly have been those of Brixham or Torbay, even the quays seemed to have been painted as a stage backcloth and to lack only a chorus of fishergirls and French sailors ready to break into their opening dance routine.

  Betsy pointed. “That’s the Yacht Club. Very, very millionaire and chi-chi, but we shall get asked there for drinks by people. Tom and Ann knew crowds, and I’ve inherited their set.”

  “French or English?”

  “Both, and here and there a dash of American, though mostly French. And that’s another blessing about you, Caro—your French is going to be a help, considering that mine is just about Fourth Form. Since Tom and Ann went, I’ve been communicating with Marie, our help at the villa, in sign language, and at parties it’s so galling not to be grasping the gist and even having to miss out on the nice things Frenchmen manage to say without sounding as if paying a compliment hurt! But look—if you’ve seen all you want for now, shall we go back and catch a swim and a sunbathe at Bar Soleil before we go somewhere for lunch?”

  An hour later Caroline had had her first swim in the Mediterranean and both in the water and on the sands had been introduced to as many of Betsy’s cronies as had also elected to foregather at the Bar Soleil that morning. When they had dressed and were leaving the beach Betsy commented, “Everyone wants to be seen at Soleil just now; ten days or so ago it had to be Journée d’Or and next week or next month it could be Pic-Nic or La Grotte. Actually it couldn’t matter less. They all have identical juke-boxes and Coca-Cola signs and they all charge the earth for their dressing cubicles and those slatted sunbathing things—caillebots, aren’t they called?”