Into Temptation (Spoils of Time 03) (65 page)

She walked, more slowly now, into the shadows, along the rue St Sulpice, stopped outside the door through which Luc had led her that first day, the door into the courtyard, and then the door to their home, up on the third floor, to the tiny apartment where they had lived together for three long years, as Paris moved from peace into war, and for her, from happiness into pain.

She rang the bell; Madame André opened the door, her old face smiling with happiness that she had come back. ‘I was afraid, Mam’selle, I would not see you again. Certainly not today.’

She had aged a lot; she had seemed to Adele old at the time, in wartime Paris, but now she was really old, at least seventy, her face deeply lined, her grey hair sparse, but her dark eyes brilliantly alive.

‘May I come in? I would so like to talk to you some more.’

‘But of course. I am delighted to have a visitor, I am alone much of the time these days. But I am quite happy,’ lest Adele should feel sorry for her, ‘really very happy indeed.’

She made a pot of coffee, poured her some absinthe; the taste of the two together, the strong coffee, the liquorice-tasting aperitif that Adele had drunk so often to please Madame André, while disliking them both, took her back in time more vividly still, to when she would sit there in the dark little room, either too hot or too cold, while Noni chattered in the background and more often than not Lucas wailed on her knee . . .

It was hot that night; so hot that the window was open on to the street. They settled near it, in order to feel the faint breeze in the evening air, and Madame André smiled at her. ‘So – you want to speak some more?’

‘Yes,’ said Adele, ‘yes, Madame André, I do.’

Lucas studied himself in the mirror; he quite admired what he saw. Someone tall, slim, stylish (he hoped Venetia would agree to the silk shirt and admire the slightly pointed shoes); with the dark hair and eyes and slightly olive skin of his French ancestry. He was, he could see, very like his father; he had studied countless photographs. It made him feel, he wasn’t sure why, slightly superior to the rest of the family. Well, more interesting, anyway.

He went to the drawer to get out his wallet; he intended to buy Venetia a drink before dinner. And then remembered his mother had never given him the francs she had promised. Damn. He phoned her room: no answer. He tried Reception; they told him she had gone out.

He went along to Venetia’s room and knocked on the door; she opened it, still wearing her dressing gown.

‘I’m not ready yet. Sorry. Lucas, you can’t wear that shirt to Maxims. Nice shoes, though.’

Lucas sighed. ‘I’ll change the shirt,’ he said. ‘I was half expecting you not to appreciate it.’

‘It’s a lovely shirt. It’s just not suitable.’

‘Anyway, I know I’m early. Do you know where my mother is?’

‘Yes, she went back to see Madame André again.’

‘Oh – right. How long will you be?’

‘At least half an hour. I did say eight.’

‘I know you did. I’ll be downstairs, then. Changed into a nice dull shirt.’

‘Good.’

He looked at his watch; he’d have plenty of time. He did want the money; he’d feel such a kid if Venetia paid for everything. And he was sure his mother wouldn’t mind. He set off briskly towards the rue St Sulpice.

The street was empty and very quiet now; everyone was out in the squares and cafés. As Lucas neared Madame André’s house he could hear voices drifting out of the window, very clear on the still, evening air. Madame André’s and his mother’s.

Lucas had spent his life listening in to other people’s conversations; it was how he had learned a great many crucial things. He had absolutely no scruples about it.

He stood there quietly, leaning on the wall near the window, totally out of sight, and lit one of the Gauloises that made him feel slightly sick but which he was determined to master. And listened.

‘So, you have been married again, Mam’selle? You must forgive me, I must not continue to call you that.’

‘Oh, Madame, please do. It’s – well, it’s important. Yes, I have been married. And now I’m getting divorced.’

‘Mam’selle!’ The brilliant eyes were soft with sympathy. ‘You have not been lucky, I think.’

‘I don’t know, Madame. Maybe it’s me. That’s why I’m here, to try and find out what went wrong, why I did what I did.’

‘Because you had to.’

‘I did? Are you sure?’

‘But of course. There was no other way.’

‘But why? Because the Germans were coming? Others stayed, others were more loyal. After all this time, you know, I still feel so bad, so guilty, taking the children away—’

‘No, of course it was not because of the Germans. It was because – may I be honest?’

‘Please, please do.’

‘Because of him. Because of the way he treated you. That was why you went. He – he was betraying you.’

‘I know that. Of course I do. But – I should have talked to him about it, worked something out, not just rushed away as I did, leaving him here’ – her voice shook – ‘alone. I should have been braver, I should have been willing to stay.’

‘I think you have forgotten, Mam’selle, how brave you were.’

‘I was?’ Adele was astonished.

‘But of course. You know he wanted you to leave, he urged you to go home. And you longed to go, you told me so, home to your family and your mother, to have your children safe.’

‘Oh.’ She sat staring at her, across the dark, over-furnished little room, took a large sip of the absinthe and promptly regretted it. ‘Did I really?’

‘But of course. You refused, time and time again. You said your home was here and your place was with him and the children. Whatever the risk. I heard you arguing about it one day, the sound came down from your little balcony.’

‘Oh.’ She was silent, digesting this new, absolutely unfamiliar piece of her history, that was, nonetheless, so plainly true.

‘I was very fond of you, Mam’selle. But I wanted you to go. To be safe. I was very afraid for you.’

‘How did you know Luc was being unfaithful to me? He didn’t – didn’t bring her here?’

‘Of course not. But I saw him coming home late, I saw his face sometimes, distracted, irritable as he rushed in. I saw your disappointment when arrangements were changed, cancelled. I am an old woman and, more to the point, I am French, we have a great instinct for these things.’

‘So – it had been going on a little while, do you think? Well, I suppose I must have realised that.’

‘A little while, I think, yes. A few weeks, maybe one or two months.’

‘Oh.’ She wondered then: wondered very sadly, if Luc had been pressing her to go home so that he could be rid of her, could return to his wife. He had been very duplicitous; it was perfectly possible.

‘I was very fearful for you. And so very sad when I realised you had discovered it. Although it set you free to leave. I was glad of that at least. But you must believe me, Mam’selle, you were brave. Very brave and very true. For a long time.’

‘Oh,’ she said again. This was so different from what she had thought. She really had forgotten he had urged her to go: absolutely forgotten it. It made everything seem rather different . . .

Lucas left, swiftly, made his way back to the hotel, changed his shirt and apologised to Venetia for not having any money with which to buy her a drink.

‘I really wanted to.’

‘Lucas, it couldn’t matter less. Honestly. It was sweet of you to think of it even.’

He seemed rather quiet, she thought, quiet and slightly distracted.

Perhaps meeting Madame André had upset him; Adele had been afraid it might.

‘Who lives up there now?’ Adele said suddenly, indicating the top floor.

‘Oh – another young couple. With another baby.’

‘
Plus ça change
,’ said Adele, smiling. She felt much happier suddenly. ‘
Plus c’est la même chose
. That’s an expression in England too, you know.’

‘It is?’ Madame André hesitated. ‘Would you like to go up there, see the place again? I’m sure they would be pleased to show you.’

‘Oh—’ She flinched from that. ‘Well – I’m not sure. Not sure if I’m brave enough.’

‘You! Not brave? After what you did, made that journey all alone – come, I will ask them.’

And so it was that Adele stood once again in the small apartment, looking over the rooftops, and remembered not only happiness, not only love, but bitterness and the fierce, unbearable pain of betrayal. A betrayal, she now knew, that had actually rewarded courage, loyalty and selflessness. And she was able to look, finally, and with forgiveness, at herself and her flight from Paris, so many years ago . . .

CHAPTER 34

It was to be nearly all hers. It felt terrible; she felt terrible. She would have given anything not to have it: not just because of her mother, but because it felt so wrong, so – so overloaded, so uncomfortable. Like eating a huge meal, and being asked to sit down for two hours and offered another. She just didn’t want it all. She really didn’t.

Jamie had talked her through it. Explained that the lawyers had decided that everyone could be informed of their entitlements, since there were no great complications, there were ample funds for the taxes and death duties, and it at least enabled everyone to get on with their lives.

‘Your mother left almost everything to you. In trust, that is. Most of her personal fortune, and Lyttons in its entirety. Apart from the thirty-two per cent of Lyttons London owned by the family.’

‘And they’re going to buy the rest?’

‘They hope to.’

‘Can’t I just give it to them?’

‘No, Jenna, you can’t. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘But I want to.’

‘Darling, you can’t.’

She had been fiddling with a stapler on his desk; she suddenly threw it down, petulantly childlike, got up, and walked over to the window and looked out. He watched her. She was still very, very easily upset, trembled on the edge of her raw grief. She struggled, day by day, struggled to be brave, to cope with it all, to behave as she knew her mother would have wanted, but it was horribly hard. The grief caught her unawares; came out of nowhere, tore at her when she was doing the simplest, happiest things, riding, walking on the shore at Southampton, shopping, giggling with Cathy at a TV programme. It hurt even to watch her as he was now: quietly patient, waiting for her to recover herself. Again.

‘It’s so unfair,’ she said suddenly, then managed one of her rather fierce smiles. ‘So unfair. Tell me, is there anything for Mr and Mrs Mills?’

‘Yes, there is. Ten thousand dollars. And the cottage for the rest of their lives. And five thousand for Maria.’

‘That’s really nice. I’m glad. What about the Millers? Billy and Joan. Lots, I hope.’

‘Quite a lot. One hundred thousand dollars. Whatever that is in pounds.’

‘That’s really good. And – Charlie? What about him?’

‘Well, first of all, your mother has appointed him as your guardian.’

‘Well, of course she would have done. She knew how much we loved each other.’

‘I know. But it still needed to be confirmed, legally. In her will. So he has day-to-day care of you.’

‘Fine. And did she leave him any money?’

‘She did. Two hundred thousand dollars.’

She smiled happily. ‘That’s great. I’m so very glad. He deserves it.’

She obviously felt, Jamie thought, in her touchingly childlike way, that it was a reasonable bequest, the sort of thing Charlie would be pleased about. Actually, of course, it was an insult.

He had been insulted: insulted and outraged. Jamie could see that. He had fought to keep it under control, had said how very generous, but he had left as soon as he politely could, his face white, his mouth set.

Difficult: very difficult. Of course it was sensible. Whatever Barty had left him, he would have run through in no time. For Jenna’s sake it had been decided not to pursue the matter of the forged cheques, for which Charlie had been reluctantly grateful. But it would be very difficult: to be the widower of someone with a personal estate of around three million dollars, and to be the guardian of her extremely rich child, when all you had been left was two hundred thousand dollars. Jamie actually wondered why Barty had left Charlie anything at all, why he had even featured in her will; but of course all her affairs were in perfect order, they always had been, and she would not have risked his getting his hands on her fortune, however remote the chance might be.

How could she have done that, Charlie thought, walking so fast, so hard up Sixth Avenue that he kept crashing into people, almost knocking them over, angry with them as well as with himself. He thought he might laugh, at first: laugh out loud. At the sheer bloody ludicrousness of it. Two hundred thousand bucks. To him. To her husband. Out of an estate of – what? Three million easily, he had calculated. If you added in the houses and the shares and so on and so forth. Before tax, anyway. It was horrible: an insult. Worse than nothing, in a way. That would have been a drama, he would have attracted interest, sympathy, rather than the embarrassed looks he knew he’d get now.

That was how she rated him, as worth little more than her servants. Look at him, her will said, look carefully, I want you all to see that he cannot be trusted with any more, he doesn’t deserve it, he will waste it, lose it, he must not have it. OK, so he’d lied to her a little; he’d still loved her, cared for her, made her happy, made her laugh, and looked after her child, her grieving, broken child as if he had been her own father. Of course Barty hadn’t expected that: hadn’t expected to die, hadn’t expected to leave him. But it still meant the same thing: that was how she rated him; very, very low. It would scarcely cover his loan repayment. He felt absolutely diminished.

He began to feel something entirely new that afternoon: only a tiny sliver of a thing, but most certainly there, drifting about in his head. He had been violently jealous of all the Lyttons for some time. That went without saying. But this was new and more dangerous than that: and it centred on Jenna.

There had been nothing of the company for the Lyttons; somehow they had all hoped, against the odds, that there might be. That she would give them a further percentage. Of course there were the share options and Barty had hardly expected to die so young, she had imagined growing old in the company, exactly as Celia had, and no doubt felt she had done more than enough for them. But – still. They had hoped.

To recover something that had been absolutely theirs, and had become absolutely hers, partly through her own efforts to be sure, but mostly by an accident, or a series of accidents, of chance meetings, love affairs, wars, deaths, bequests, going back into the mists of time, into the estates of the Elliotts.

It hurt Celia the most, of course; she felt it personally, felt it as a deliberate blow. How could she have done that? Barty, the child she had saved from poverty and cruelty and neglect, Barty, who had been educated and trained and groomed by her for the position she finally reached, Barty, who knew what Lyttons had meant to Celia, holding as much of her heart as any of her children. How could she not have felt bound to return it to her, and to her family, in the event of her own death? It was a very cruel final blow.

Lucas was different somehow. Adele couldn’t quite work out how. He had been sweet to her for a long time now, thoughtful and affectionate; but since going to Paris, he had become somehow less arrogant, less inclined to criticise everyone, even his cousins, who had always been his targets. And he spent more time with Clio, which pleased her enormously, and actually wrote thank-you letters, without Adele having to nag him, and asked her what she would like him to wear for any social event to which he was accompanying her.

She didn’t comment on it, of course, and he seemed perfectly happy; but she did wonder what might have brought it about. Maybe just meeting Madame André, feeling that part of his life less mysterious and confused. Or that he was closer to his roots.

She would probably never know; but she was certainly very grateful for it.

Jay was finding the delay in settling the company’s affairs almost unbearable. Marcus Forrest was tightening his screws day by day; only the previous week he had blocked the purchase of a novel, which Jay had wanted very much to buy, and refused even to consider it, without really giving any explanation, apart from the fact he just felt it was overpriced and slight. Jay, who had encouraged the author and his agent into thinking he was certain to buy it, had to endure the humiliation of telling them that, after all, he must turn it down. The word was out all over London by lunch time, that Jay Lytton was now in the pocket of New York, and that his judgement wasn’t worth the time of day.

He found himself increasingly at the receiving end of memos instructing him not to buy this, not to publish that, to wait for a decision while Forrest read something, which often meant he lost the book in question anyway. It was driving him mad. He was still capable of brilliant ideas, lateral thinking, following hunches against considerable opposition – his coup for the year had been his plan to publish a thriller in three parts, the first just out. He had fought the entire editorial board, apart from Celia, who backed him with huge enthusiasm, and had won. It had proved not only a great promotional success, attracting vast publicity, but a financial one; the bottom line would be three successful books for the price of one. The author was still reeling at his own naïveté.

After that, Jay had felt he might win more battles; but it proved to be a one-off. Forrest plainly regarded him as yesterday’s man. Which was hard to take at the age of forty-four, when he actually felt he should have up to twenty years ahead of him. He didn’t like to contemplate what would happen to him if they were unable to buy the company, if they couldn’t raise the money, or the trustees decided to set the price too high, thereby enabling other, richer purchasers to get hold of Lyttons. He would probably find himself out of a job.

Jay was by nature optimistic; it was one of his most endearing characteristics. And the optimism was well-founded. The nickname Lucky Lytton, first bestowed on him at school, had followed him through university, a hugely dangerous war, and indeed for most of his career. Jay just never got caught. Where others were beaten for truancy or smoking or drinking, sent down from university for having girls in their rooms, trapped into marriage by unwanted pregnancy, wounded in battle, Jay Lytton, having run the same risks, emerged unscathed. He had a gloriously happy marriage, a beautiful family and a success that was partly, at least, quite unearned. But now it seemed, the famous luck was running out; fate was finally demanding her revenge.

Izzie and the boys had also been sent for by Jamie and told of their inheritance. Ten thousand dollars for Izzie, and five each for the boys ‘to be invested in Neill & Parker,’ Jamie had said, ‘or whatever company Neill & Parker might become—’

‘What, you mean like Neill, Parker & J.W. Thompson?’ asked Mike.

‘Something like that, yes,’ said Jamie. ‘The point is, it’s for the company. Otherwise it reverts to Barty’s estate.’

‘It’ll be invested all right,’ said Nick. ‘How amazing.’

Jamie smiled rather wearily. ‘She was an amazing person.’

They went down to Chumleys, the three of them, and proceeded to get very drunk.

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Izzie. ‘I really, really can’t. It’s such a lot of money.’

‘
You
can’t believe it! How do you think we feel? Five thousand bucks apiece. All for Neill & Parker.’

‘I know. It is so extraordinarily generous. Oh dear,’ she smiled a shaky smile, ‘I’d much rather she was here.’

They were silent, suddenly ashamed to be so openly celebrating their good fortune.

Izzie looked at them. ‘Listen. It’s fine,’ she said, ‘she’d be so pleased we were pleased. Anyway, it won’t be ours for a long time. Years possibly, Jamie said. I quite like that, it makes me feel less – greedy.’

‘Yeah. What do you think you’ll do with your money, Princess?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. I thought I might buy a new rug.’

‘Isabella Brooke,’ said Nick, kissing her tenderly, ‘you sure know how to live.’

It amazed her how much she loved him, and how much he loved her. They were, as he often said, quite appallingly happy.

Neill & Parker was also doing well: not brilliantly, but well. The bulk of their business was still books; and they weren’t making enough to tell Joanie Morell to disappear up her own arse, which was Mike’s most dearly held ambition. But the gallery account had grown, and so had another account, a stationery chain, and Izzie’s idea for the gallery’s radio campaign had led them into negotiations with a small record company. They were still in the same office, and the three of them still did all the work, but there was just about enough of both work and money to fund another employee if necessary.

The boys had been worried about never paying Barty back, but clearly she hadn’t minded in the very least. She had bequeathed them her investment in the company as well as the money.

Izzie still missed Barty terribly, there was a huge gap in her life and always would be; but at least she and Nick both saw a lot of Jenna, invited her over to dinner, with Charlie and Cathy. Nick was less keen on Charlie than Izzie was, he said he wouldn’t exactly trust him with his last cent, but he was happy to spend time with him, if that was what Izzie and Jenna wanted.

Of Geordie they heard nothing, apart from the letter he wrote to Izzie when Barty died, saying how sad he was, and how much he knew she would miss her, ‘as indeed shall I. A very great loss to all our lives.’ It was as if none of them had ever known him; Izzie found it rather disturbing.

He was still living in Washington, had published a new, very successful novel, and was reportedly having an affair with a young editor.

‘Poor girl,’ Izzie said, when she heard this on the literary gossip line. And meant it.

Noni told her he had never been back to England, never tried to see Adele; she was divorcing him. He never saw Clio, it was all very sad.

‘But Maman is so much better, even beginning to take photographs again. And Lucas is really quite human! He went to Paris with Maman and met the old lady who was the concierge where they lived before the war; it seems to have been a very good experience for him, I don’t know why. He’s even talking of joining Lyttons if he’s allowed, after National Service. Can you believe that?