“For falling in love with the wrong sort of boy. Oh, I suppose I was a bit of a handful. They told me I’d brought the whole family into disrepute. They said I had no moral compass, that if I didn’t watch myself no decent man would want to marry me.” She laughed, without humor. “Of course, the fact that my father had a mistress for years was quite a different matter.”
“And then Laurence came along.”
She smiled at him slyly. “Yes. Wasn’t I lucky?”
He talked to her in the way that people tell lifelong secrets to fellow passengers in railway carriages: an unburdened intimacy, resting on the unspoken understanding that they were unlikely to meet again. He told her about his three-year tenure as the Nation’s Central Africa correspondent, how at first he had welcomed the chance to escape his failing marriage, but hadn’t adopted the personal armory necessary to cope with the atrocities he witnessed: Congo’s steps to independence had meant the death of thousands. He had found himself spending night after night in Léopoldville’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club, anesthetizing himself with whiskey or, worse, palm wine, until the combined horrors of what he had seen and a bout of yellow fever almost ended him. “I had something of a breakdown,” he said, attempting to emulate her light tone, “although no one is impolite enough to say so, of course. They blame the yellow fever and urge me not to go back.”
“Poor Boot.”
“Yes. Poor me. Especially as it gave my ex-wife yet another good reason not to let me see my son.”
“And there I was, thinking it was that little matter of serial infidelity.” She laid her hand on his. “I’m sorry. I’m teasing. I don’t mean to be trite.”
“Am I boring you?”
“On the contrary. It’s not often that I spend time with a man who actually wants to talk to me.”
He didn’t drink in her company, and no longer missed it. The challenge she posed was an adequate substitute for alcohol, and besides, he liked being in control of who he was when he was with her. Having spoken little since his last months in Africa, afraid of what he might reveal, the weaknesses he might expose, he now found he wanted to talk. He liked the way she watched him when he did, as if nothing he might say would change her fundamental opinion of him, as if nothing he confided would later be used in evidence against him.
“What happens to former war correspondents when they become weary of trouble?” she asked.
“They’re pensioned off to dark corners of the newsroom and bore everyone with tales of their glory days,” he said. “Or they stay out in the field until they get killed.”
“And which kind are you?”
“I don’t know.” He lifted his eyes to hers. “I haven’t yet become weary of trouble.”
He sank easily into the gentle rhythms of the Riviera: the long lunches, the time spent outdoors, the endless chatting with people of whom one had only limited acquaintance. He had taken to long walks in the early morning, when once he had been dead to the world, enjoying the sea air, the friendly greetings exchanged by people not bad-tempered with hangovers and lack of sleep. He felt at ease, in a way he had not for many years. He fended off telegrams from Don, threatening dire consequences if he didn’t file something useful soon.
“You didn’t like the profile?” he had asked.
“It was fine, but it ran in the business section last Tuesday, and Accounts wants to know why you’re still filing expenses four days after you wrote it.”
She took him to Monte Carlo, spinning the car around the vertiginous bends of the mountain roads while he watched her slim strong hands on the wheel and imagined placing each finger reverently in his mouth. She took him to a casino, and made him feel like a god when he translated his few pounds into a sizable win at roulette. She ate mussels at a seafront café, plucking them delicately but ruthlessly from their shells, and he lost the power of speech. She had seeped into his consciousness so thoroughly, absorbing all lucid thought, that not only could he think of nothing else but no longer cared to. In his hours alone, his mind wandered to a million possible outcomes, and he marveled at how long it had been since he had felt so preoccupied by a woman.
It was because she was that rare thing, genuinely unobtainable. He should have given up days ago. But his pulse quickened when another note was pushed under his door, wondering if he’d like to join her for drinks at the Piazza, or perhaps a quick drive to Menton?
What harm could it do? He was thirty, and couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed so much. Why shouldn’t he enjoy briefly the kind of gaiety that other people took for granted? It was all so far removed from his habitual life that it seemed unreal.
It was on the Saturday evening that he received the telegram telling him what he had half expected for days: his train home had been booked for tomorrow, and he was expected at the Nation’s offices on Monday morning. When he read it, he experienced a kind of relief: this thing with Jennifer Stirling had become strangely disorienting. He would never normally have spent so much time and energy on a woman whose passion was not a foregone conclusion. The thought of not seeing her again was upsetting, but some part of him wanted to return to his old routines, to rediscover the person he was.
He pulled his suitcase from the rack and placed it on his bed. He would pack, and then he would send her a note, thanking her for her time and suggesting that if she ever wanted to meet for lunch in London, she should telephone him. If she chose to contact him there, away from the magic of this place, perhaps she would become like all of the others: a pleasant physical diversion.
It was as he put his shoes into the case that the call came from the concierge: a woman was waiting in reception for him.
“Blond hair?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you mind asking her to come to the telephone?”
He heard a brief burst of French, then her voice, a little breathless, uncertain. “It’s Jennifer. I just wondered . . . if we might have a quick drink.”
“Delighted, but I’m not quite ready. Do you want to come up and wait?”
He tidied his room rapidly, kicking stray items under the bed. He rearranged the sheet of paper in his typewriter, as if he had been working on the piece he had wired across an hour earlier. He pulled on a clean shirt, although he didn’t have time to do it up. When he heard a soft knock, he opened the door. “What a lovely surprise,” he said. “I was just finishing something, but do come in.”