Jasmine Harvest Page 4

  “What is her business?”

  “She has a shop—no, sorry, a salon! ‘Salon Ariane’—on the Croisette, where she sells antiques and objets d’art, which she’s pleased to call her ‘treadmill’—you heard her—though actually it’s her assistant, a Polish refugee named Witold Czinner, who does all the donkey work and clinches most of the sales, they say. If she isn’t doing pretty well, I wouldn’t know what she uses for money, for a shop and a service flat over it right on the Croisette must cost her the earth. But all I hope is that that wedding-ring and the ‘Madame’ she calls herself means she really has got a husband off-stage. Because if it’s true, as the set says of her, that she’s only putting on a dedicated career-girl act while she angles for Paul, that puts me way down the track on the very first lap. I mean, can I hope to compete with the brand of S. A. her type seems to be born with? I ask myself. Well, can I?” Betsy appealed rhetorically.

  Studiedly blunt, Caroline said, “Simple. If you know you can’t make the distance, don’t compete. Meanwhile, it strikes me your set thrives a lot too much for its health on hearsay and gossip and a mass of woolly speculation, and as far as I can see, the only person who isn’t tangled in a web of the stuff is Berthin Pascal. How has he managed to keep clear of it? Or hasn’t he?”

  Betsy took Caroline’s empty cup and returned her own to the tray. “Oh, Berthin—” she said, her tone dismissing him.

  “Well?” invited Caroline.

  “Well, just that, except as the principal blot on Paul’s landscape, he doesn’t signify much. He’s probably about Paul’s age, thirty-two. But he’s more than a bit of a gargoyle and terribly earnest and upstage. The worthy type. You know!”

  “His sister then? Ursule?”

  “Oh, she’s the dragon curled up at Berthin’s gate. Older than he is and devoted to him, and though by the same token Paul can do no right in her eyes, as she doesn’t speak English the things she says of him go right over my head, thanks be. But look, Caro—while I sling these things into the kitchen for Marie to wash up, will you write her a note in French to tell her we’ll be out this evening and that we’ll settle for, say, an omelette and some fresh fruit for dessert when we come in? There’s a ballpoint and some paper on the bureau there. Can do?”

  “I hope so.” Pen at the ready, Caroline paused to ask, “By the way, I gather from what Ariane Lescure said I shan’t be meeting friend Paul tonight?”

  Betsy turned at the door. “No, he’s in Paris. I told you—he goes there fairly often, though I don’t know what for. But after Mummy telephoned, I told him you were coming down and he said he would be back within the week. So you’ll see him before long.”

  “I can hardly wait!” murmured Caroline, and was relieved when Betsy took the irony of that in good part with an emphatic, “Beast!” and a wrinkling of her nose as she left the room.

  When Betsy set the little car to the road once more the sun had barely set. But as they dropped circuitously towards Cannes, here and there its earliest lights were pricking the dusk, and by the time they reached the front, the lamps of the Croisette were already a necklace of strung beads for the noble curve of the bay.

  On the way Betsy had been worried about the car’s performance. She had had it in dock a day or two previously, she told Caroline, but it still was not pulling properly and she would not undertake the uphill return journey until it was. So they left it for checking at an all-night garage on the Rue des Lerins and walked the short distance to Ariane Lescure’s flat.

  There the street door alongside the darkened salon opened automatically to their ring. “Trust her to have all the glamor gadgetry,” was Betsy’s tart comment. And again, as they mounted the stairs to a crescendo of noise, laughter and the chinking of glasses, “I ask you! Her idea of ‘a few people’ always is the kind of rout that would crowd the Casino to its doors!” Then a second door opened to them; their arrival caused a brief hush among the people nearest to it; across a smoke-haze they were scrutinized; then Betsy was being greeted by howls of welcome and Caroline was being introduced to a catalogue of Christian names.

  Someone brought them drinks without consulting their tastes. Betsy drifted away and came back without having contacted their hostess, and for some time Ariane was not to be seen until suddenly she was bearing down upon Betsy, both hands extended.

  “There you are at last, Betsy honey! And pretty duenna Caroline too! And what do you suppose I have as a reward surprise for you, now you are here? Why, that Paul is here after all! Here, and asking for you. Where was his little Betsy kitten, he wanted to know, and would she need rescuing from the clutches of the English cousin, did I suppose? So of course I told him no—if possible, the English cousin was even more ch—But there he is now to see for himself. Yes, over there, talking to Aimée Honorat ... He doesn’t see us, I’m afraid. Oh, now he does—Paul, viens-toi, mon ami!” As she called, she made a castanet crack of finger and thumb which caused heads to turn and the man she was signalling to nod and to sketch a wide, leisurely salute in reply.

  A moment more and he was excusing himself to his companion and was threading his way through the crowd. Then Betsy, radiant, was ducking away from his playful tweak at her hair; Ariane, by way of introduction of him to Caroline, was murmuring his name, and then he was ready with a formal hand outstretched at the same time as his audacious eyes, meeting Caroline’s, were for some reason daring her to acknowledge him as anyone other than the total stranger which they both knew he was not.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LATER, Caroline was to tell herself she could not possibly have known she would meet this man again. And yet, doing so against all the odds, it was as if some uncanny sixth sense which had never doubted it had drained the moment of enough surprise to enable her to share the small conspiracy with him and to put her hand briefly in his without a glimmer of recognition.

  They exchanged the cool smiles of new acquaintances and made the socially correct remarks, Paul Pascal speaking English as colloquial as Caroline’s and, as Betsy had said, without a trace of accent. Then Ariane, her touch on his arm a half-caress at which Betsy scowled said, “I’ll collect you on my next time round, Paul, Meanwhile, have fun!” and Betsy clamored, “Paul, I don’t understand! I thought you were still in Paris. Why did you come back, and how and when?”

  He grinned down at her from the height she had described to Caroline as “way up here.” “Questions to be answered in their respective order, as for exam paper?” he queried.

  She giggled. “Yes.”

  “Well, then—why? Because Paris had lost its savor and suddenly didn’t seem to have what it takes.”

  “Oh, Paul! It couldn’t! Not Paris!”

  “Then it must have been the counter-attractions down here. Next question— How? By train. When? Last night, arriving this morning.”

  “But last night’s train was how Caroline came. I met her off it here, and you weren’t on it!”

  “I had been. Going up, I had boarded it at St. Raphael, so on the way down I got off there, in order to pick up my car. I drove home and took a most necessary bath, and during the morning I rang you to suggest coming down for a swim.”

  “You rang me? Paul, you lamb—did you really?” Betsy’s rapt expression was just this side of slavish.

  “Cross my heart. But Marie said you weren’t in. So, I swam alone and after lunch I rang Ariane, who asked me to come along tonight, and here I am.”

  “Yes, and two lovely days before I expected to see you! But you could have tried phoning me again after lunch. I showed Cannes to Caroline this morning and we swam too—from Bar Soleil. But we were back at the villa some time after three. And anyway I wonder you didn’t happen to see Caroline on the train. In the bar or the restaurant car or somewhere. But I suppose you didn’t or you’d have said, ‘Well, fancy that!’ or ‘The world’s a small place’ when you met each other just now, wouldn’t you?”

  Momentarily a crooked brow lifted in Caroline s direction. Then he agreed
gravely, “We should, shouldn’t we? Therefore we couldn’t have met ... And yet, d’you know—” the rakish glance became a direct scrutiny—“I’ve an idea I did see Cousin Caroline, though only in passing, as it were.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. As I got off at St. Raphael, I saw her through the window of the corridor, probably on her way back to her berth from breakfast.”

  ‘Oh, only then? Well, even if you’d known who she was, that was too late for a get-together, wasn’t it? So you’d better have one now while I hunt down Clare West, who borrowed a bikini from me last week and hasn’t uttered about it since. But stick around, Paul, won’t you? Don’t leave yet, because I’ll be back. Oh—and incidentally, Caroline isn’t the halfwit over French that I am. She more or less cut her milk-teeth on it and she speaks it marvellously. Show him, Caro—do!” Betsy urged as she left.

  In silence the other two watched her go. Then, still speaking English, Paul Pascal said, “Tricky. But between us we handled it pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Handled what?” asked Caroline tartly, though she knew. “If you mean not telling Betsy and Madame Lescure that we did meet on the train, perhaps you’ll tell me why it’s to be ‘handled’ at all?”

  “Didn’t you want it to be?”

  “Why should I?”

  “But if you didn’t,” he countered, “why, at sight of me just now, didn’t you cry, ‘Ha, villain!’ and unmask me as the fast mover who made an abortive pass at your virtue last night?”

  “Don’t be silly. I suppose because you weren’t and didn’t,” Caroline retorted, piqued by the ridicule of his tone.

  “Ah, but wouldn’t it have made a wow of a story that I was and did? No, shall I tell you why you held your peace when you saw I was going to hold mine?”

  “If you like, and if you think you know why.”

  He nodded maddeningly. “I imagine I do. It was for the same reason, on which I’ll bet you a dozen pairs of nylons—what size do you take?—to a packet of cigarettes, that you hadn’t mentioned last night’s little brush even to Betsy?”

  “I hadn’t, as a matter of fact.”

  “But not because you’d forgotten, it. Because it rankled.”

  “Rankled?”

  “That’s what I said. You knew you’d gone unnecessarily stiff-necked over my innocent invitation to make peace over a drink, and you weren’t risking Betsy’s missing the whole point of the story and wondering what all your virtuous umbrage was about. Confess now—am I right?”

  Caroline fought a brief losing battle with her honesty. “In a way, yes,” she admitted. “Later I did realize I hadn’t behaved as well as I might have done. But even if I had second thoughts about accepting before I left, I didn’t have them any more when you and the attendant went all-boys-together at my expense when you thought I couldn’t hear what you said.”

  Unrepentant, he laughed. “Just how wrong can you get? At the time you were meant to hear, in order to pay you out for being so upstage. And other fish in the sea; other trains on the Metro—how else is a man to save his face when a pretty girl has done her best to stamp on it? Which is, you might say, where we came in—I hope you realize, I mean, that it was to save your face with Ariane and Betsy that I signalled ‘Cave’ as I did?”

  “To save mine?”

  “But of course! At that moment, if you’d batted an eyelid of recognition, or if I had, we’d have had to give chapter and verse of how, when and where, and as, on your own admission, you already had a conscience about treating me so badly, don’t you see how your very sense of guilt would have aided and abetted me in seeing that you came out of the thing a lot worse than I did?”

  At the sheer audacity of that Caroline had to laugh. “All right,” she said. “And now I suppose I’m expected to lead a deputation of thanks to you for your forbearance?”

  He appeared to consider the suggestion. Then, magnanimously, “No, I’ll pass that up if you’ll agree to settle on both sides for an assurance of no enduring hard feelings, no malice borne—hm?”

  Dimpling, Caroline echoed, “No hard feelings. No malice borne. Except for—”

  “I’ll stretch a point. Except for what?”

  “For allowing me to stumble on in French as you did, when you can speak English as you do and when from the moment I opened my mouth you must have known by my accent that I wasn’t French at all. If I may say so, that was just plain mean!”

  “Mean? Nothing of the sort! That was just my native chivalry at work, letting you speak French if that was what you wanted. Because you addressed me first, if you remember. You begged my pardon.”

  “Then you did know?”

  “Of course, just as you’d recognize a foreign accent yourself. But perhaps it wasn’t entirely chivalry either. Because if you could berate me like that in French, what, I asked myself, might you be capable of in your own language, and I felt I’d rather not know!”

  “You don’t,” Caroline told him dryly, “have to overstate your case. But what you are saying is that you knew I was English. Not German for instance, nor Dutch?”

  “Oh, yes. If you hadn’t opened your mouth, you had that English rose stamp about you. What’s more—can you take this, I wonder?—before you stalked off in a state of dudgeon, I’d had occasion to admire the excellent clarity of your block lettering on the label of your bag.”

  “You mean you’d read my name on the label? So that if you’d already heard it from Betsy—?”

  “Which I had. And though Betsy hadn’t added a description of you, when your label made me a free gift of ‘Neville, Passenger to Cannes via Paris’ can you wonder I promised myself there, ought to be a piquant flavor to our next encounter?”

  For a moment he watched her in impish enjoyment of her discomfiture. Then he quoted briskly, “ ‘No malice borne’—remember? I’m holding you to that,” and took her empty glass from her.

  “What were you drinking? A dry sherry? Then if you’ll wait here, I’ll go and track down another for you. Oh, and while I think of it,” he turned on a heel and grinned back at her, “about those cigarettes you owe me—I smoke Gauloises, I’ll settle for a pack of twenty, and I’ll give you time to pay!”

  He returned a few minutes later, but Ariane Lescure came with him and so did the man named Claude and another girl. Paul moved away to join another group presently and Caroline only glimpsed him again before Betsy sought her out to say she was ready to leave if Caroline was, but that there was a snag. She had rung the garage to hear that the car could not be ready until the morning, which meant that they would have to beg a lift.

  “But there are two characters, laboratory students from one of the perfume factories at Grasse, who say they can drop us at Villon on their way home,” she added. “Those two over there near Paul. I’m not so sure, mind you, that one of them, the fair one, Henri, isn’t a bit high. But if he is, I’ll make André promise to drive, so we’ll get home in one piece, I hope.”

  Paul, however, when he heard of the plan, had other views. “Nonsense. I’ll take you back myself,” he said.

  “Oh, Paul, how super of you! I’d much rather go with you. But what about Henri and André—they have offered,” Betsy worried.

  “You’ll have to cry off, or I will for you. In their state they might manage to make Villon by instinct and Grasse by scent. But neither Caroline nor you, honey, are riding with them while they try, see?”

  “All right, though André is still sober.”

  “Want to bet he will be, when he hits the fresh air? Have you said goodnight to Ariane? No? Well, cut along and do it, and I’ll see you both outside.”

  When they went out he was waiting by a long open car. Betsy made to get into the seat beside the driver’s, but his hooked finger beckoned her into the back.

  “You can sit beside Caroline. I need elbow room tonight.” With his hand on the mechanism of the hood, “Do you want this thing up or down?” he asked.

  When both girls said, with one v
oice, “Down, please,” he set off and Betsy sat forward, cradling her chin on her linked fingers on the back of the seat beside him.

  “I wish you’d let me drive this car some time, Paul.”

  “This one? All right.”

  “You mean I may?”

  “M’m. Give me time to get dual control fitted, and we’ll stage a tearaway on Daytona Beach or Pendine Sands.”

  “Daytona! Paul, you know I meant I want to drive it alone, myself, say in the Gorges du Loup or along the Corniche!”

  He nodded. “I do know. But you’re not going to. It’s a lot too powerful for you on these roads. So you’d better stick to that bubble-gum you’ve got and in which you look just like what the grown-ups promised me I might see if I plied a clap pipe and bowl of soapsuds long enough, though all I ever got was the colors of the rainbow!”

  At that Caroline laughed, but Betsy only frowned.

  “Paul, you beast! I’m a good driver and you know it. And if you don’t let me try this one, one of these days I’ll play hookey with it and show you,” she threatened.

  For answer he reached back with a finger and thumb and tweaked the small nose that was just below his shoulder. “You play hookey with my car, and you’ll get the spanking of your young life. And now could you refrain from breathing down my neck and entertain Caroline instead? She’s the guest,” he said.

  He was a superb driver himself, handling the powerful car as if he and it, centaur-like, were one entity. Behind them the lights of Cannes dropped away and as they climbed, the hilltop ones which studded the darkness ahead appeared to be hung in the sky. Much sooner than Caroline expected or wanted, the car swept through sleeping Villon and drew up at the little house.

  “You’ll come in, Paul?” Betsy asked.