Solitaire

‘You,’ she said very distinctly, ‘are quite the most loathsome man I have ever met.’

‘But then I would say such encounters have been rather limited, have they not? Nor is it exactly courteous to describe a prospective employer as loathsome.’

‘You’re not my employer. Nothing would prevail on me to work for you,’ Marty declared tremblingly.

‘No? But do you imagine you have a great deal of choice?’ he enquired. ‘You haven’t sufficient money to eat, and travel to a larger place to find work—even supposing there was anyone willing to give you a job. You have no relatives or friends to help you, on your own admission, and I should warn you that the authorities do not look kindly on indigent foreigners.’

‘How dare you call me indigent! I’m a trained secretary.’

‘So I read in your passport,’ he said almost negligently. ‘I should not otherwise be offering you work.’

Marty gave a gasp of utter frustration. No matter what she said, he seemed to have an answer.

‘Oh, this is ridiculous!’ she declared. ‘I—I’m going.’

She tried to march past him to the door, but his hand closed on her arm detaining her. She was aware of an almost overwhelming impulse to forget her upbringing and sink her teeth into his tanned flesh.

‘I advise against it,’ he said infuriatingly, almost as if she had voiced the thought aloud. ‘I can promise you that you would not enjoy the inevitable reprisals.’

She stood very still, her eyes downcast, conscious only of the firm pressure of his hand upon her arm.

‘Will you let me go, please?’ she asked politely.

‘Will you stop turning my salon into a battleground?’ he returned, but he released her arm. ‘You are in no fit state to discuss anything rationally at the moment. You have had a number of shocks today, which I regret. At least let me make amends by offering you a meal and a room for the night. In the morning you may feel better disposed to listen to what I have to say to you.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ she muttered. ‘All I really want to do is get away from this place.’

‘Then your most sensible course of action is to earn sufficient money to make this possible,’ he said unemotionally. ‘You would not find me ungenerous in the matter of wages. In any case, earnings in France are higher than in England.’

There was an awful kind of logic in what he said, Marty told herself despairingly. For a moment, she toyed with the idea of asking him to advance her the fare home on the understanding that she would repay him when she got back home and found another job. But she herself could see the flaws in this. For one thing, with unemployment running rife, she had no real guarantee she would find another job very easily. And when she did, she would need somewhere to live, and had little idea how much she would have to pay for rent, and heating, not to mention her food and clothes. What money would she have to repay anyone?

An involuntary sigh broke from her lips. He had not exaggerated when he had said she was in no state to consider his offer. She wasn’t just physically tired from her days of travel. She felt emotionally battered as well, her grief and disappointment at what she had discovered at the Villa Solitaire now being joined by a very real fear of what the future might hold. She had destroyed what fragile security she had had to snatch at a shadow. It had been the first reckless act she had ever committed, this journey to France, and it had ended in disaster.

And as in a kind of dream she heard Luc Dumarais summon the housekeeper and order her to escort her to a guest room, it occurred to her with a little shiver of disquiet that this might only be the beginning of the disaster …

In spite of her forebodings, Marty fell asleep on the bed Madame Guisard somewhat grudgingly made up for her. The room itself was charming, with its white-painted walls, contrasting with the smooth modern lines of the furniture, and the deep velvety green of the fitted carpet. There were no curtains at the windows, but Marty had grown accustomed to using shutters, and she was used too to managing the long rather hard bolster that fitted under the bottom sheet in place of a pillow. Sleep when it came was dreamless, and she felt oddly refreshed when she woke to find the shadows lengthening in the room, and Madame Guisard bending over to tell her stiffly that dinner was on the point of being served.

Adjoining her room was a tiny cubicle containing a shower, a handbasin and the ubiquitous bidet. As she hurriedly rinsed her face and hands in the basin, and dragged a comb through her sleep-tousled hair, Marty wondered whether she ought to have made the effort to change for dinner. But a swift mental review of the clothes she had brought with her soon convinced her it would only be foolish. She found herself wondering whether Luc Dumarais would subscribe to convention sufficiently to put on a shirt before sitting down to dinner. After a final slightly disparaging glance at herself in the mirror, she went out of her room and downstairs to the hall where she hesitated, wondering where she would find the dining room.

As she stood there, Luc Dumarais walked out of the salon and stood watching her, his dark face enigmatic. He was wearing close-fitting dark trousers, and though he was tieless, his frilled white shirt was immaculately white. A dark blue velvet jacket hung casually over his shoulders. He looked totally and arrogantly masculine, and Marty felt the force of his dark attraction reach out and take her by the throat. She swallowed, every instinct urging her to deny these new and troublous feelings which were invading her tranquillity.

She was defiantly glad she had made no effort to change. It would have been humiliating if he had interpreted such an action as an attempt by her to persuade him of her own femininity. The casualness of jeans and a top made her feel less vulnerable.

‘I have decided that we will eat outside tonight. It’s a perfect evening,’ he said. ‘Would you care for an aperitif?’

‘No—I mean—yes, I suppose so,’ she said, feeling unutterably gauche.

‘What do you drink?’ he enquired.

She was tempted to reply, ‘A glass of sherry—once a year for the Queen’s speech,’ and see what his reaction was, but she controlled herself.

‘What do you recommend?’ she countered brightly.

‘Perhaps you should try a pineau,’ he said. ‘It’s the local aperitif, and you probably won’t have come across it in England.’

How very true, Marty thought, as she followed him into the salon. He left her there with a quick polite word of apology while he went to fetch the drinks, and she wandered over to the glass doors that led out to the patio. A table set with a white linen cloth had been placed there, and Marty noticed with a sinking heart that place settings had only been laid for two. It appeared that Bernard would not be joining them, and she was going to have to suffer a dinner těte-à-těte with the master of the house—the very last thing she wanted under the circumstances. She gave a little barely perceptible sigh. The setting, the warm summer night, and the man who was soon to join her were all of the stuff that dreams were made on, and the sooner she remembered that she was prosaic Marty Langton, the better it would be for her. She had listened to the other girls who worked in her office gossiping about their boyfriends, but none of them had ever warned her that you could be physically attracted to a man you did not even like. She’d imagined there would be a safe pattern to these relationships—an enjoyment of a man’s company leading steadily on to warmer, more intimate feelings in the fullness of time.

But Luc Dumarais did not fit into any pattern that she had ever conceived, even in her wildest dreams. He was quite simply beyond her scope, and it worried her to realise how much of her thoughts he was beginning to monopolise.

‘Martine.’ She turned with a little start, to find that he had come silently back into the room and was standing close behind her holding out a glass to her.

‘A votre santé,’ he said rather mockingly, raising his own glass in salute.

She bent her head, muttering an embarrassed, ‘Cheers,’ and sipped at her drink which in spite of the fact that it was icy cold, spread a new and welcome warmth through her body. Its flavour was sweet and rather rich, and she smiled at him with rather shy appreciation.

‘It’s good.’

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. ‘Shall we take our drinks outside?’ he suggested.

The heat was not as intense as it had been earlier now that evening was approaching, and the merest whisper of a breeze came sighing through the clustering pines only yards from the house to disturb the stillness of the warm air.

César was lying on the patio, his head sunk on his paws. He lifted his head and barked as Marty appeared, but at a sharp word from his master he resumed his somnolent pose.

‘Are you frightened of dogs?’ Luc Dumarais held the chair for Marty to sit down.

‘I’m not really used to them,’ she answered truthfully.

He smiled slightly. ‘César will soon come to accept your presence here.’ He lifted a water jug from the table and added some water to the liquid in his glass, watching it appraisingly as it turned cloudy.

He spoke, Marty thought indignantly, as if it was all cut and dried that she was going to stay and work for him. She was just about to voice her thought when Madame Guisard appeared with the tureen of soup that constituted the first course, and she had perforce to save her comments for later.

‘Is Bernard not joining us?’ she asked tentatively as she picked up her spoon.

Luc’s dark brows drew together. ‘He is eating in his room,’ he said briefly. His tone did not encourage any further discussion, so Marty let the matter drop. She recalled Jean-Paul telling her that afternoon that Bernard had only come to live with his father a year ago. It seemed that even in that short period the relationship between them had deteriorated drastically. And she still wasn’t clear about Bernard’s motives for posting Uncle Jim’s letter as he had done. It seemed such a pointless thing to have done. Yet, she supposed philosophically, at least through his action she had learned that Uncle Jim had died, however painful the knowledge was. At least she now knew she had nothing to hope for, and that she had to put that childish dream of loving security which Uncle Jim had inculcated behind her for ever.

Had it really been a burden to him, she wondered, as she drank the delicately flavoured vegetable soup, that rash promise he had made to her all those years ago? The thought grieved her almost as much as the news of his death had done. She could imagine him becoming increasingly desperate as the years went by, and there seemed no way to redeem his promise, then this final reckless splurge on this villa he could not really afford. But even then he had hesitated to send for her, as if aware that it was all going to go wrong for him. Why else had he written the letter and not posted it? And his forebodings had proved only too real, it seemed, and she sighed imperceptibly as she laid down her spoon.

‘You look sad again,’ Luc Dumarais remarked as the fish, cooked in cream and mushrooms, was set in front of them. ‘Is the food not to your liking?’

‘Oh no, it’s magnificent.’ Marty glanced up startled. She had not realised he was observing her so closely. ‘I—I was just thinking about Uncle Jim.’

He shrugged. ‘That is natural. I hope these thoughts will persuade you to act sensibly.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked guardedly.

‘I should have thought it was obvious. Jacques must have had a deep concern for you to act as he did. Can you imagine his reactions now if he knew you were alone, without friends or money, refusing help when it was offered?’

She bent her head. ‘I think, like myself, he would have wanted to know a little more about what that help entailed before committing himself,’ she said in a low voice.