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Simon seemed ready to make some argumentative reply, but something he saw over my shoulder distracted him. “Damn.” He glowered into his wine glass. “Don’t look now,” he muttered, “but we’re about to be invaded.”
It must be the couple from the bar, I thought—the couple from America. Either that, or Scarlett O’Hara herself had just snuck up behind my back. “Hel-lo,” drawled the feminine voice at my shoulder. “Is it all right if we join your little party? I was just saying to Jim how tiring it is to have to speak in French all the time. Boys, you don’t mind, do you? Hello, Neil. I heard you playing this afternoon and I said to Jim it’s just like being in Carnegie Hall—no, really, it is. Hello, I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Garland Whitaker.”
“Emily Braden.” I briefly clasped the ring-encrusted hand, feeling somewhat dizzy after that introductory speech. Jim Whitaker shook my hand firmly and sat down beside his wife, facing the window to the street. His solid, almost stoic figure made an intriguing contrast to his wife’s gushing mannerisms. They were both in their mid-forties, I decided, although Garland fancied herself younger.
“The boys have picked you up, I see,” she said to me. “You have to be careful with these two, you know. They look harmless, but they’re really not. Oh, Paul,” she shifted in her seat, “do you think you could be a dear and make that Thierry understand that the heater in our room is just too hot for us? I tried to explain it to him, but I don’t think he knew what I was saying and his English is really so awful…”
It hadn’t sounded awful to me, but then the French did have a mischievous tendency not to speak well when it suited them. I’d watched many a Parisian waiter play the game with unsuspecting tourists, particularly tourists who were difficult to deal with. Garland Whitaker, I thought, might just qualify for that distinction.
Her husband, on the other hand, appeared to be a different sort of person entirely. He had kind eyes. “Thierry speaks English perfectly well,” Jim Whitaker informed his wife in a calm voice. “If you’d stop talking to him like he was a two-year-old with a hearing problem, you’d find that out.”
Garland Whitaker ignored the rebuke and smiled brightly at all of us. “Jim’s mother was French, you know. Or so he says.” She cast a teasing eye upon her husband. “I never met your parents, darling, so I have to take your word. But really,” she told Paul, “Jim can only speak a little French, and you get along so well with Thierry, I’m sure you’d have no problem…”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Paul promised.
“Oh, wonderful. Now, listen,” she continued, leaning forward in her seat, “while everyone’s here… I’m thinking we should all take Christian out to dinner tonight. You know, a sort of going away party.”
Paul looked surprised. “Christian’s going away?”
Neil Grantham smiled, and answered, “Not exactly. He’s moving out of the hotel, though, into a house.”
“The house her husband used to live in.” Garland flashed a gossip’s eyes. “Can you believe it? Apparently she owns it, though she hasn’t lived in it herself for ages. She let him use it, instead.”
I didn’t know who “him” was—“her” husband, obviously, but that hardly helped. Still, I didn’t think it polite to ask.
“I suppose it will be nice for Christian, having a whole house to himself,” Garland went on. “Mind you, I wouldn’t want to live where somebody had died… can you imagine how awful? And in a sense it’s kind of tasteless, don’t you think, for Martine to even offer? Out with the old, in with the new. I mean, her husband isn’t even buried…”
“Ex-husband,” Simon cut her off abruptly. “He was Martine’s ex-husband.”
Paul finally looked across and noticed I was all at sea. “A woman that we know,” he told me, quietly. “Her ex-husband killed himself night before last, by accident. He tripped and fell down the stairs.”
“Not down the stairs,” Simon made the correction in authoritative tones. “Over the banister. Broke his neck.”
“Ah,” I said.
Garland Whitaker smiled slyly. “Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe Christian did it, just to make sure…” She broke off suddenly and twisted round in her seat as the hotel’s front door slammed. “Why Christian, darling, we’d almost given up on you! Come on in and join the gang.”
I had the distinct impression that the man hovering in the open doorway would have preferred to face a firing squad.
He appeared to be around my own age—a lanky, soft-eyed man with rough blond hair that looked as if he’d cut it himself with a pair of garden shears and a beard that seemed more the result of simply forgetting to shave than of any concerted effort to grow one. His clothes, too, were rather rumpled and oddly matched, his denim jeans stained with small splotches of bright color.
“I must go and change my clothes,” he excused himself self-consciously. His voice was quiet, edged with a German accent that kept it from being soft. “I have missed the bus connection back from Saumur, and it has made me late.”
“You will join us for dinner, though?” Garland Whitaker pressed him, then turned her smile on all of us. “We are going for dinner, aren’t we? To give Christian a proper send-off?”
It wasn’t so much an invitation as a stage direction, I thought. The man named Christian wavered a moment longer in the doorway, then gave in like the rest of us.
“Of course,” he said politely, and faded into the hallway. The heavy clump of his shoes on the stairs had a faintly defeatist sound.
Simon slouched back in his seat, scowling blackly, and opened his mouth to say something. I didn’t actually see Paul’s elbow move, but I did see Simon jump a little in his seat, and whatever he had meant to say he kept it to himself. Garland Whitaker, triumphant, turned her attention back to the rest of us, and started talking abo
ut some day trip she and her husband had taken, or were planning to take… I’ll admit I didn’t really listen.
She just went on talking anyway, red curls bobbing with the motions of her head, that honeyed Southern voice giving way to grating trills of laughter. Like Simon, I was not impressed. I felt the frown forming on my own face, and could have used Paul’s elbow in my own ribs to remind me of my manners. Instead, some instinct made me glance upwards, at the face of the man sitting beside me.
The look Neil Grantham slanted back at me was privately amused.
But he wasn’t smiling, and he didn’t say anything to me. So there really was no reason why I should have looked away as quickly as I did, face flaming, like some prudish Victorian spinster. Or why I should have felt, all of a sudden, a ridiculous urge to run.
